by Isabella Leitner (Author), Irving A. Leitner (Epilogue by)
The deeply moving true account of a young Jewish woman's imprisonment at the Auschwitz death camp
In 1944, on the morning of her twenty-third birthday, Isabella Leitner and her family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp. There, she and her siblings relied on one another's love and support to remain hopeful in the midst of the great evil surrounding them. In Fragments of Isabella, Leitner reveals a glimpse of humanity in a world of darkness. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a celebration of the strength of the human spirit as it passes through fire," this powerful and luminous Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir, written thirty years after the author's escape from the Nazis, has become a classic of holocaust literature and human survival.Author Biography
Isabella Leitner (1921-2009) was born and raised in Hungary. On her twenty-third birthday, she was deported to Auschwitz along with her mother, four sisters, and brother, an experience she wrote about in her acclaimed memoir Fragments of Isabella, which was published in 1978 and named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. A motion picture based on the book was produced by the Abbey Theater in Ireland. In 1945, the author immigrated to the United States and married Irving A. Leitner, who served in a US Air Force bomber squadron during World War II. The mother of two sons, Peter and Richard, whom she considered "her greatest victory over Hitler," Leitner also wrote Saving the Fragments: From Auschwitz to New York and The Big Lie: A True Story.