And Peace Never Came

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

This is the autobiography of a Holocaust survivor who was born in
Hungary in 1921 and transported to Auschwitz in 1944 after years of
hiding with her family. Most of Elisabeth Raab’s family did not
survive. After the war, she wandered aimlessly throughout Europe as a
displaced person (DP)—lonely, without money, unable to trust, and,
with the exception of her memories and a few keepsakes, bereft of her
past. Included in this book are a map tracing Raab’s European travels
from 1944 to 1948 and six pages of historical notes by Marlene Kadar.

The author’s early life in Hungary comes across as idyllic when
contrasted with the experience of her surviving relatives in a postwar
communist Hungary. Rabb reveals little about her prewar arranged
marriage or about the daughter she lost in the Holocaust. Her life after
1948 is similarly glossed over: she devotes most of her attention to the
1944–48 period and to “a life that didn’t seem worth the effort of
living.”

Rabb offers thanks to Canada, which has become her residence, and
especially to the often-maligned WASPs of Toronto: “I am thankful for
their stable culture and their principles, for their unconfusing, solid
outlook, for their puritan, rational traditions. Their sense of security
and strength allowed me time to relax, to ease my way into the
country’s true nature, and to feel as close to being ‘at home’ as
I could hope to be.” A tranquil island in a sea of unpleasant
memories.