Lala's Story

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1932, Lala Weintraub grew up in Lvov, Poland. When the Nazis came, Lala - who had blond hair and blue eyes - survived by convincing them she was a Christian. This book tells her story. Following an opening chpater on the 1945 liberation of Katowice, the Polish town where Lala had been living, Lala recalls preparing for the Nazi arrival by obtaining forged papers and memorizing Catholic prayers and rituals; she relates how she managed to convince everyone: German soldiers, interrogators, fellow Poles that she was a Polish gentile girl named Urszula. She tells of the toll that this dual existance extracted from her of the wounds on her soul and her psyche left by her inability to merge her disparate identities.