Suddenly the Shadow Fell

I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now, what made me defy my mother, but it was the first miracle of my survival.

All 17-year-old Leslie Meisels knows in June 1944 is that he must get his family out of the terrible conditions in the ghetto in Debrecen, Hungary. Over his mother’s objections, his decision to push their way on to a transport could have sent them all to a death camp. Instead, they join the roughly 20,000 “Jews on ice” whose lives are saved — temporarily — in Austria. After the war, when Leslie is finally starting a new life in freedom in North America, he meets Eva, who is also a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, and together they face their pasts and look forward to the future.