In this memoir, Gabriella Karin tells her incredible story of survival through the Holocaust. A Jewish girl in Bratislava, she and her family were forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Gabriella, only 14 years old, and her family spent nine long months hiding in a small apartment across the street from the Nazi-Slovak Gestapo. She and her family survived thanks to the selfless help of their savior, Karol Blanar, whom Gabriella later had recognized as a "Righteous Person Among the Nations." Her memoir continues by following her life's journey after the Holocaust moving to the newly created state of Israel and eventually settling in Los Angeles with her husband, Ofer, and son, Rom. Gabriella has dedicated her life to Holocaust education as a docent and speaker worldwide. She has become an acclaimed sculptor through which she dramatically depicts the horrors of the Holocaust and also inspires hope for a more peaceful future.

Drawing on cases across a range of life-threatening experiences, Laurence Gonzales makes a compelling argument about fear, courage and the adaptability of the human spirit.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

The idea of survival is a recurrent theme in discussions both of family and of art. Whether understood in physical, mental, or spiritual terms, it is inextricable from the most basic questions of human existence, encompassing the ways in which individual experience can persist after death. Questions of survival and immortality are thus central for understanding the artistically expansive family at the center of this volume: Alice Lok Cahana, a Holocaust survivor and painter; her son Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, a writer and stroke survivor; and his daughter Kitra Cahana, a photographer who embeds herself in communities in order to tell their stories. Complemented with fascinating essays that provide powerful insights into memory and trauma, this beautifully illustrated book interweaves powerful accounts of these three artists with a complex story of human experience, legacy, and meaning.

Designed for psychotherapists and their clients, Peter Levine's latest best-seller continues his groundbreaking exploration of the central role of the body in processing—and healing—trauma. With foreword by Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score In Trauma and Memory, bestselling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Building on his 45 years of successful treatment of trauma and utilizing case studies from his own practice, Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps. While acknowledging that memory can be trusted, he argues that the only truly useful memories are those that might initially seem to be the least reliable: memories stored in the body and not necessarily accessible by our conscious mind. While much work has been done in the field of trauma studies to address "explicit" traumatic memories in the brain (such as intrusive thoughts or flashbacks), much less attention has been paid to how the body itself stores "implicit" memory, and how much of what we think of as "memory" actually comes to us through our (often unconsciously accessed) felt sense. By learning how to better understand this complex interplay of past and present, brain and body, we can adjust our relationship to past trauma and move into a more balanced, relaxed state of being. Written for trauma sufferers as well as mental health care practitioners, Trauma and Memory is a groundbreaking look at how memory is constructed and how influential memories are on our present state of being.

This book examines posttraumatic autobiographical projects, elucidating the complex relationship between the ‘science of trauma’ (and how that idea is understood across various scientific disciplines), and the rhetorical strategies of fragmentation, dissociation, reticence and repetitive troping widely used the representation of traumatic experience. From autobiographical fictions to prison poems, from witness testimony to autography, and from testimonio to war memorials, otherwise dissimilar projects speak of past suffering through a limited and even predictable discourse in search of healing. Drawing on approaches from literary, human rights and cultural studies that highlight relations between trauma, language, meaning and self-hood, and the latest research on the science of trauma from the fields of clinical, behavioral and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, I read such autobiographical projects not as ‘symptoms’ but as complex interrogative negotiations of trauma and its aftermath: commemorative and performative narratives navigating aesthetic, biological, cultural, linguistic and emotional pressure and inspiration.