Thanks to My Mother

Thanks to My Mother is a World War II memoir by Schoschana Rabinovici. Published in 1998, it won the 1999 Batchelder Award. In the memoir, Rabinovici describes the ways her mother protected her from Hitler’s forces when they invaded Lithuania. The book is popular with both teenage and adult readers. Rabinovici, also known as Suzanne Weksler, lived through the Holocaust and survived the concentration camps thanks to her mother. Of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage, critics believe her memoir is one of the most revealing and honest accounts from the period. Thanks to My Mother is her only book.

Thanks to My Mother includes black-and-white photographs of Rabinovici’s family, including her mother and father. It also includes poetry Rabinovici wrote during her time in the concentration camps. For authenticity, the poems haven’t been edited for the memoir. Revealing Rabinovici’s deepest feelings and her greatest fears, the poems are uncensored and raw.

Although Thanks to My Mother includes honest depictions of violence, torture, and life in a concentration camp, the memoir is suitable for teenage audiences. About a mother’s love and the sacrifices a parent is willing to make for her child, the book is accessible to younger readers.



Rabinovici opens Thanks to My Mother with her final memory of her father. She recalls seeing him for the last time on June 22, 1941. Her father, working for the civil air defense, responded to an air-raid alert. He is described as a kind and diligent man who always did his best to keep his family calm. On this day, he promised that the alert was a false alarm, but he did not return home. Later, she learned that he had been captured by the Germans.

Describing her life before the Holocaust, Rabinovici remembers her upbringing fondly. She comes from a lower middle-class background; her family ran a popular convenience store. She was very close to her father, and when she wasn’t spending time with her governess, she was at the movies or the ice rink with him. However, once World War II began, everything changed.

The Russians occupied Lithuania in 1939. Her mother had an affair with a Russian man; her father moved out of the house. The Russian government took over the store, and the family was forced to move in with this new man, Julek Rauch. Rabinovici forgave her mother for falling in love with someone else, remaining very close to both her parents at the time. Her father, she laments, died because he didn’t want to move too far away from her.



When the Germans invaded Rabinovici’s hometown of Vilnius, pushing back the Russian forces, everything became worse for the family. The Germans established the Vilnius Ghetto for the Jewish population where Rabinovici lived in constant fear of starvation, death, and cruelty at German hands. Her mother vowed to do all that she could to ensure they were never separated because they were all that each had left.

Rabinovici describes the extraordinary lengths to which her mother went to keep them together. For example, she carried Rabinovici in a canvas rucksack on her back to smuggle her into a concentration camp in Latvia. If this hadn’t happened, it’s likely that the Germans would have selected Rabinovici for death because she was not old enough to work.

Rabinovici’s mother labored in the Kaiserwald concentration camp for a time. During this period, Rabinovici posed as an adult by dressing up and wearing concealed heels. She describes the pain and fear she felt during each roll call when the Germans selected weak or ailing Jewish people for death. Even at this young age, Rabinovici understood that each day might be her last.



Rabinovici asserts that she could not have survived the Holocaust without her mother’s help. When they were imprisoned in slave camps and forced to starve, only her mother’s iron will, and her endless love, kept her going. Her mother gave her the courage to fight for her life every day.

Rabinovici describes what it is like to be part of a prisoner’s death march, the final cruelty she endured before she was eventually rescued. For eleven days, she marched with her mother from Stutthof to Tauentzien. Somehow, they both survived the march, but Rabinovici became gravely ill, falling into a coma before the camp was evacuated. When she awakened, she was free; the war was over.

Although Rabinovici wishes that her family could have stayed together and that her parents had not divorced, she knows that a Russian man’s interest in her family saved her life at one point. If her mother hadn’t fallen in love with Julek, he wouldn’t have kept them off the deportation registers for so long, and they would have been separated.



Thanks to My Mother is one woman’s account of surviving the Holocaust, but it speaks to the wider Jewish experience. Rabinovici describes the concentration camps and the roll calls through a child’s eyes, reminding us how even the youngest and weakest can become the bravest.