A review by mellabella
The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman

4.0

Beautiful story about Josef and Lenka. Their love spanned 60 years, survived the Holocaust... I have read other books (fiction and non) about the Holocaust. Books about people who survived, what they went through, how they kept believing and had hope. But never a love story like this. Josef and Lenka meet when they are very young. She is a friend of his sisters and an artist. He is in medical school. They are torn apart when he and his family flee the Nazi invasion. They are married at that point. Hastily but, very much in love. She cannot leave her family and he cannot provide visa's for all of them. The chapters alternate between them as we learn how Josef escaped to London, then settled in NYC. Marrying a woman who had lost just as much as him. They had two children. How Lenka survived the ghetto Terezin,and then Auschwitz. She marries a soldier and has a daughter. This book is very good. I could not put it down. But, it was very sad. Of course the atrocities that people suffered at the hands of the Nazi's will never cease to make me feel that way (amongst the other emotions you feel when you read about the Holocaust). It was how Josef and Lenka settled for comfortable, love instead of the passionate love they had for each other. Each thinking the other was dead. Lenka right after Josef leaves. He is the only remaining member of his family. Josef after repeatedly attempting to locate Lenka after the war. Although he is told that she was killed in a gas chamber incorrectly. It made me wonder just how many real life couples, torn apart like them, went through the same thing.