Yearning to Breathe Free: My Parents' Fight to Reunite During the Holocaust - Hardcover

On February 1, 1940, Ernestyna Goldwasser arrived alone in New York Harbor. She had left behind her family, to seek sanctuary from the marauding Germans, who had invaded Poland the previous fall. As the child of a father who held US citizenship, Ernestyna enjoyed a special status, as she too, was deemed a US citizen. Unfortunately, her husband, Chaskel, enjoyed no such status. As his wife, pregnant with their first child, embarked on her journey, Chaskel was forced to remain behind, trapped in the inferno that was soon to engulf and incinerate one third of the world’s Jewish population.During her valiant struggle to reunite with her husband, they maintained an intimate and highly emotional correspondence. Many of their letters have been preserved and are presented in this volume as a first-person account of their desperate struggle to find the key that would unlock Chaskel’s imprisonment...before it was too late.

Murray Jack Laulicht holds a BA from Yeshiva College and an LLB summa cum laude from Columbia University School of Law. After serving on the staff of the Warren Commission and clerking for the Honorable Harold R. Medina of the US Court of Appeals in New York City, he practiced law for more than forty years. He is a Chairman Emeritus of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, President of the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and a member of the boards of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Stern College for Women, Ohr Torah Stone, and Jewish Federations in Florida and New Jersey. Mr. Laulicht and his wife, Linda, have four daughters and many grandchildren.