In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Through her parents' experiences and the stories they recounted, Fass defined her engagement as a historian and used these skills to better understand her parents' lives.

Fass begins her journey through time and relationships when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. That journey to recover her family's story provides her with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory and its winding path toward historical reconstruction. In the end, Fass recovers parts of her family's history only to discover that Poland is rapidly re-imagining the role Jews played in the nation's past.

Paula S. Fass is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has written many books and articles, including Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization, and Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. 

The children of [holocaust] survivors face the burden of the unspoken past; relatives discuss the past in whispers and fragments of conversation. Fass' remarkable memoir pieces together these fragments to tell a poignant, honest account of her parents' lives and families—their endurance, suffering, and loss. Highly recommended.

Paula Fass combines her skills as an historian, writer, and researcher with her position as a child of survivors with memories imparted by her parents to create an unusual memoir of being part of the "second generation." Her exceptional skills as a writer make this book more than the usual random memoir of information. The result is a touching family story supported by historical fact.

Paula Fass's moving memoir is written with quiet dignity and the most impressive moral lucidity. Her account of a family devastated by genocide is testimony both to human resilience and to the painful price of emotional fragility paid in the midst of the resilience.

In this moving and eloquent book, Paula Fass explores the legacies of love and loss that the children of Holocaust survivors inherit.