The Ghosts on the Wall

Even in a field as deservedly crowded as Holocaust literature, Kenneth Wald's book is a genuinely singular - and shattering - addition. With an expert scholar's rigor and a family member's emotional stake, he has reassembled the saga of his grandparents and parents from the small town in Germany where they thought themselves fully accepted through the horrors of the Nazi regime, which only the author's mother and father escape. And this is a book not only about the Jews of Germany, but the Christians, as well, both those who betrayed the family and those who have courageously kept alive its memory. Ghosts on the Wall is both an interrogation of and an inquiry into history itself.

-Samuel G. Freedman, Professor at Columbia University and author of Who She Was: My Search for My Mother's Life

At the heart of this illuminating memoir are Curt and Regina Schonwald, Jewish owners of a textile store in provincial Germany. Murdered in the Holocaust, they live on in their letters to their son in America, in their grandson's efforts to recover their story, and in a few Germans' dedicated memory work. An incisive and deeply moving book.

-Doris Bergin, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto and author of War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust

Bringing his impressive scholarly skills to bear on his own family history, the distinguished political scientist Kenneth D. Wald documents the fascinating story of his parents, Jewish refugees from Germany who came to America and established a new life in Lincoln, Nebraska. This is a story not only about persecution and emigration during the Holocaust, but also about life, memory, and identity among Jews in the American heartland in the second half of the 20th century.

-Alan E. Steinweis, University of Vermont

Ken Wald has given us a searching and sensitive account of three generations of his family's history with the Holocaust-and of his evolving views of the nation that perpetrated it. This is a smart, touching, and open-hearted book that deserves a wide readership.

-Peter Hayes, professor at Northwestern University, author of Why? Understanding the Holocaust