Roma Ben-Atar resisted until late in life the urging of her family to share the
memories of her Nazi-era experiences. The Holocaust exerted a dark pressure on all of their
lives but was never openly discussed. It was only when her granddaughter insisted on hearing the
whole truth, with a directness partly generational, that Mrs. Ben-Atar agreed to tell her
story. What Time and Sadness Spared is a journey of both loss and
endurance, moving with shocking speed from a carefree adolescence in upper-middle-class
Warsaw to the horrors of the Final Solution. The young girl sees her neighborhood transformed into a
ghetto populated by skeletal figures both alive and dead. Unbelievably, things only grow worse as
this ruin gives way to the death factories of Majdanek and Auschwitz and the death marches of 1945.
Life in the camps changes her in less than a day, as if "the person in my body was a stranger I had
never met." Her only consolation is to lie on her wooden bunk, no mattress, and speak to the soul of
her mother, who, like virtually her entire family, had already been swept away. Roma must summon
astonishing powers of adaptation simply to survive, bringing her finally through the wreckage of
postwar Europe and to an entirely new life in Israel.In this unique family collaboration
Roma Ben-Atar's son Doron, a historian who brings with him fluency in psychoanalysis,
contributes through his commentary an awareness of the difficulties presented by historical
narrative and memory. A visitor to the much-changed sites in which his mother grew up and was
interned by the Nazis, he also voices the perspective of the survivors' children and their
ambivalence over being "protected" from this past. As the generation that endured the camps passes
from this world, What Time and Sadness Spared illustrates with particular urgency the historical
responsibilities of the survivors' descendants, who must become the new vessels for a story that
will not remain alive on its own but demands our courage and curiosity.