The Lost Wife

I absolutely loved reading this novel. My emotions ran high from the beginning of the book until the very end! I really cannot comprehend what a person had to go through to survive the conditions the Jews were placed in the ghettos and camps! My heart hurts for all the Jews who were lost! The author put together a criss-criss of generations lives, and it was exciting to read, but sad, too.

My grandparents came to America from Czechoslovakia in 1920 but left their families behind. I understand a few cousins were sent to a ghetto. I don’t know if they were Jewish or not but I am now very interested in finding out. I was told when I was young that they were liberated. This story touched my heart and I so wish I could meet Lenza. What a warrior she is!

An epilogue would have been nice. To read about two people separated for 60 years and then cut it off just as they find each other again leaves the reader in limbo.

I wish I could have given this book 3&1/2 stars. Amazon you should add this feature to your customer reviews. The writing is adequate and the story plausible. This story is about Jewish European lovers who are victims of the Nazi holocaust. Lemka and Josef fall deeply in love in pre-WWII Prague just as the Nazi threat is looming. Josef's family secures U.S, visas for the family including Lemka as Josef's wife. They are unable to include Lemka's family in the group. The sponser, a cousin in the U.S., is only willing to sponser the 5 of them. Josef & Lemka marry. Josef knows that he is unable to secure visas for Lemka's family, but Lemka does not. Her father is aware of the problem but urges Josef to marry Lemka and take her to the U.S. with them. Lemka who loves her family deeply refuses to leave them even though her family including her beloved father urges her to go. Josef and his family are scheduled to be in England for two months before sailing for America. Josef continues to try to convince her to join them as does Lemka's father while it is still possible. She steadfastly refuses. I am sure these scenarios really occured in pre- WWII Europe. These dramatic events are believible. We as the reading audience are clammoring for her to join him. We see only trouble ahead. The author quickly makes minced meat out of our frustration at this turn of events. (Spoiler Alert). However,the ship on which the family sails sinks at sea and only Josef survives. Had Lemka joined them she would have been on the lifeboat with Josef's sister and mother and she would surely have perished. Lemka is informed that the whole family died and that Josef is dead. Josef's many letters never reach Lemka who has now been excluded from Prague's social and economic life because she is a Jew. The family survies in the ghetto mainly on the handouts of their prior maid, Lucie, a country girl who left them when she married. They considered her part of their family and she thought of them as family. The Jews had been ordered to turn over their radios and anything of value. However, they entrusted Lucie with a few momentos of jewelry to hold for them until after the war.Lemka and her family are ordered to Terezinstat, the show ghetto which the Nazis would doll up every now and then for Red Cross inspectors from Switzerland. They would start out by transferring all of the elderly, sick , and feeble inhabitants to Auschwitz so that the ghetto would not look as crowded as it really was. The thinnest inhabitants were transferred to death camps so that only the fittest were on view for the inspection. As soon as the inspection was over, the Nazis would bring in more trainloads creating the terrible overcrowding that was its consistent characteristic once again. Lemka was an artist. She was assigned to indoor sedentary work creating individual painted postcards for Nazi soldiers. Other artists were charged with painting larger canvases. Some painted portraits for the soldiers from photographs, and they received extra food for those. One created fabulous copies of great paintings used to adorn Nazi homes. They also surreptiously created paintings and drawings of camp life depicting sickness, torture, and death among its inhabitants at great personal risk. These they hid within the ghetto walls. The children also created art with the miniscule amount of supplies surreptitiously provided by these artists. Some 4500 children's drawings were also hidden within these walls. They are now on display in various museums on the holocaust including the Jewish museum in Prague. I have been to the Jewish museum in Prague which is in one of the few remaining intact synagogoues in Europe. Most of them were burned often with their Jewish members locked inside. It was allowed to stand, because Hitler planned a museum on Europe's extinct Jewish culture. Only a few of the paintings and drawings are on display. A better use would be to donate the great majority of them to the Holocaust museum in D.C. and Yad Vehem, the holocaust museum in Israel. I am sure some have been donated. They have far more display space and more of them deserve to be displayed. I remember crying at the display of children's holocaust art in Yad Veshem.Lemka enters Terezenstadt with her family. Her father, a coal deliverer in the ghetto, is given orders to be on the next transcript to Auschwitz. Everyone knows it is a death camp. It is understandable that her mother , his wife, would volunteer to go with him. However, when Lemka and Lemka'sister and brother volunteer to accompany their father too, it strains the imagination. Lemka again believes that the family has never been separated and should not be now. Of course, the reader is screaming "don't go." Her father again tries to discourage his children from accompanying them to no avail. Lemka and her family transfer to Auschwitz. Her parents are quickly gassed. Her sister dies from the deprivation. She survives and at the end of the war is tranferred on foot to various camps. She survives the forced marches and ends up in a DP camp. She believes herself to be alone in the world. Carl, a Jewish American soldier befriends her and provides her with extra rations and goodies. He courts her and asks her to marry him. Lemka marries Carl because he has saved her. She has no great love for him as she did for Josef. Of course, there is nothing like a first love. She returns to Prague and seeks out her former home where she hopes to spend the night. The people now living in her apartment are angry and flabbergasted that she dares to return to her home. They refuse to let her in and will not allow her to spend the night. Lemka now exhausted takes a train to Lucie's village where she visits a grateful Lucie who cries upon learning of all the family deaths. Lemka finds a warm bed for the night. Lucie returns the 3 pieces of jewelry to Lemka including the gold wedding band Josef gave her. They are the only momentos she has of her family. Carl takes her to NYC where they remain married for over 50 years until his death. They have one child. Her child has a red headed daughter with a long swan neck just like her great grandmother who perished in the camps.Josef has a grandson. The grandson is about to marry Lemka's grandaughter. At the rehearsal dinner he meets his grandson's fiance for the first time and recognizes the red hair and neck. The author does not explain why a beloved grandfather would not have met the fiance earlier. When he is seated neck to Lemka who has now taken the Americanized name, Lanie, he recognizes a birthmark on her arm next to her Auschwitz tatoo. They realize they were the Lemka and Josef who loved each other and married in Prague. Then the book ends. The ending is disappointing and frustrating. The reader wants to know if they strike up their reltionship again, if they move in together, if they have great satisfaction from finding each other at last. Or is it a bust? Is the memory far greater than the relistic living love? That happens so often when rediscovering old loves. Josef married, but he never really loved his wife of many years with the passion he had for Lemka. He and his wife married for the same reasons many holocaust survivors married. They wanted to stop the lonliness and to recreate a family. He did love her and nurse her through her final illness, but something was always missing. Are we going to get a sequel? The writing quality in this book was 4 star. It was a page turner because the reader wanted to know about the rekindled relationship, but the author does not give us that. I downrated the book because the ending was frustrating. Are we going to get a sequel? I would read that.

I know so little about what happened to the Jewish people during the years before and WWII, I was totally blown away. I cried and I wanted things to turn out better for Lenka and Josef. I was pleased with the ending. I know it could have been much worse! A very good read.

I related to Lenka, one of the protagonists, so well as an artist and painter. I almost wished there would have been examples of Lenka's work! The depiction of the Nazi concentration camps is horrific. My heart aches for those who perished and those who survived and were left with nightmares.

This is a very long and sad story to say the least. The evil of Hitler and his Nazi Germany could not be told much better. However, when an author is having you read hundreds of pages to get to a previewed ending. Then ends it with half a page, containing little to no joy owed to the reader,who has stuck through nothing but sadness and sorrow, it was not worth the many hours spent.

The descriptions of the people, what they endured and the world they lived in

I found this book to be a real page turner. I was expecting just a romance story but it turned out to be much more.The book was well written and kept moving at a good pace.Whilst parts of the story were sad if not harrowing the author described them in a way to make the reader feel inspired by the strength and tenacity of the characters.I was even more inspired when I read the summary at the end of the book to find that the story and characters were based on real people and their life experiences.I was a little let down by the ending and felt that could have taken the story just a little further but I would still highly recommend this as a good read.

This is the first book I have read by this author and I found it totally absorbing. The story is no doubt an example of the incredible twists of fate during such a volatile period of history. Sad at times, but well written and a great insight into life before, during and after WWII. I became involved with the characters. I do recommend this book.

I have read this novel before and loved It

Historical fiction was 'my genre' for more than ten years, and particularly books set during WWII were the ones that I gravitated towards most often. There's something about the intensity and sadness of that era that makes for a riveting, emotional story, and The Lost Wife appealed to me so much because how much more sad can it be than a husband and wife who are seperated by war?The Lost Wife is told in the dual POV's of Josef and Lenka, who meet through Josef's sister in pre-war Prague. Their romance is short and passionate, and as war becomes more and more likely, they marry just a few short months after meeting and begin a new life together. One thing that isn't made explicitly clear in the synopsis, and may be a small spoiler (beware!) is that both Josef and Lenka are Jewish - and of course this plays a huge part in their lengthy seperation.Lenka's perspective focuses more on what happened to her and her family during the war, whereas Josef's narrative is mainly set decades later in New York, which worked fairly well, although it did feel like a small part of Josef's story, and a not insignificant part of Lenka's story weren't really given the detail that would have made this a more emotional read for me.Their romance is almost a 'typical' war romance - they don't spend huge amounts of time together before falling in love and deciding to marry, but it fits with the story - just don't go into The Lost Wife expecting chapters and chapters of epic romance - there's simply no time for it.Although I picked up The Lost Wife with a greater interest in seeing what happened to Lenka and Josef during the war, it was really Josef's experience after the war that grabbed me. Richman explores some pretty deep themes within the pages of The Lost Wife, most significantly how people deal with grief - and how knowing, or not knowing, the fate of a person you love can have a permanent affect on other relationships and your own personality.The ending was rather quick and open ended but it fits the book - the story is about Josef and Lenka's separation and the effect that it had on them, rather than their life together or what happened when they met decades later, so for me it was the perfect ending.The Lost Wife is firmly romantic historical fiction in terms of the plot, but when it comes to the actual story, there is a lot more to be revealed about human nature and how events can shape who we are. I can definitely recommend this for lovers of historical fiction, particularly ones set during wartime.

I purchased The Lost Wife from Amazon, more to please a relative rather than wanting to read it myself. I knew it was about two people separated by the second World War, and having lived through that war myself, thought I would rather stick with my usual Scandinavian Crime than read about it again!How wrong I was, the two met again 60 years afterwards in the first few pages of the book (this is not a spoiler) and I was soon in tears as I continued to read of the then too young art student, who chose to stay with her beloved family in Prague as the Germans were preparing for war, while her then too young husband chose to leave for America with his own family, without her. Both were totally ignorant of what was to happen in the following years.This is such a finely written book, examining people and their loyalties - to family, country, moral obligations and upbringing - and to reactions when faced with impossible decisions. Artistic ability and emotional courage are displayed by the young girl and forms her character and the reader will be more than rewarded by her responses to the events that she is faced with.This book is so beautifully written - read it yourself rather than ponder my description!