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Author Judy Rakowsky

Join us when author Judy Rakowsky visits to discuss her new book, Jews in the Garden.

About the author:

Judy Rakowsky is the author of the critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction book Jews in the Garden that the New York Times said “reads like a thriller” and which was an editor’s choice of the New York Times book review. She spent decades on deadline as an award-winning investigative reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, People Magazine, the Providence Journal, and other outlets. As a young reporter working in her native Ohio she got to know cousin Sam, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto and Nazi concentration camps who later raised a family in Akron and Canton. She traveled again and again to Poland with Sam in pursuit of a cousin who survived the massacre of her family in hiding with brave Poles. Describing those discoveries—the true history of what happened to these relatives—was outlawed in 2018 by the Polish government. Coverage of Jews in the Garden can be found in The New York Times, NPR’s Book of the Day, USA Today, Boston Globe Magazine, The Times of Israel, The Providence Journal, and other outlets. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Sam.

In Jews in the Garden, a young girl seals herself away, fearful at the thunderous footsteps approaching her hiding place in Zagorzyce, Poland 1944. Her fear is founded—she has been in hiding from Nazi soldiers with her family for the past 18 months, surviving on the goodwill of their neighbors and family friends. As the angry footsteps approach, men shout “Give up your Jews! We know you are hiding them!”

To the girl’s shock, the voices spoke in her native Polish—not German. Nearly 60 years later, Rakowsky’s elderly cousin, Sam Ron, shares their family’s Holocaust history with her for the first time. Ron shares not only his own experiences surviving multiple concentration camps, but he also shares the story of a beloved cousin, Hena, whom he saw each day growing up. After Ron was liberated from the camps, he expected a joyful reunification with Hena and her family, who were being kept hidden in a neighbor’s farmhouse, yet the family was nowhere to be found.

Family friends were tight-lipped, unwilling to share what became of the family. Little did Ron and Rakowsky know that this conspiracy of silence would hinder their search for Hena for years.


Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Mac's Backs - Books on Coventry.