Recovered Land

Part memoir, part history, this eloquent collection of essays records the author's travels to places in Poland and Germany where she lived as a young child during World War II. Alicia Nitecki was born in Warsaw to a Catholic family that was active in the resistance movement. Following the Nazi conquest of Poland, she and her relatives were dispersed to German prisoner-of-war, labor, and concentration camps. In this book, she revisits the places that have formed her and confronts a past that has haunted her: Warsaw during the 1944 uprising, the Black Forest village where she and the women in her family were taken as slaves in the last months of the war, and Buchenwald and Flossenburg, the concentration camps where her grandfather was imprisoned. Nitecki's private odyssey coincided with the collapse of communism in Poland and the reunification of Germany. These essays mark her movement from fear and rage toward fuller knowledge and reconciliation.