Jews in the Garden: A Holocaust Survivor, the Fate of His Family, and the Secret History of Poland in World War II

Rakowsky leveraged her award-winning investigative journalism skills to help her older cousin, a Holocaust survivor, learn more about their relatives whom, they had been told, had neighbors in their Polish hometown who helped hide them from the Nazis. But their family was never heard from again, and the two wanted to know what happened to them. The author and her cousin went on a decades-long journey to speak to former neighbors. That developed into something akin to a global detective story. Rakowsky utilized primary source materials and searched for people who had firsthand information about their family. At nearly every stage of the process, a painful truth emerges: many people in Poland were deeply complicit in the atrocities of the Holocaust, which compelled her to detail Poland’s involvement.