Ruchele- Sixty Years from Szatmar to Los Angeles

By Rose Farkas

Ruchele (“RUE-kha-la”) was the youngest daughter in an Orthodox Jewish family of ten children in Szatmar, Romania. Like many of her contemporaries, she saw her childhood cut short by the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust. In this memoir Ruchele, now named Rose, recounts her difficult girlhood in pre-war Romania and Nazi-occupied Hungary. She tells how she survived under a gentile identity in Budapest, and tells in plain words the price that she and other survivors among her family and friends had to pay. After the war, Ruchele and her new husband, Sanyi, raised their family in communist Romania, a tortured world where logic had to be twisted in order to get by. Many of the events Ruchele survived were intolerable; much of what she was forced to see was unthinkable. Although it is impossible for Ruchele or anyone who was there ever to come to terms with those events, it is only through such attempts as fill these pages that we can hope that those events will be neither forgotten nor repeated.

Hardcover, 253 pages.