To this day, I don't even know what my mother's real name
is.
Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn't until she
was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her
parents were Jewish--Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not
even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen
Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of
silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking
clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with
the resonance of truth.
Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced
together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian
royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. After Long
Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about
families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect
ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be
unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of
secrets.