Whether placed in a ghetto, a nursing home, a hospital room, or a Nazi labor camp, the characters of Polish American writer Ilona Karmel's fiction struggle with the physical confinement and diminished moral choices that the author herself encountered during the Holocaust. Within the detailed descriptions of her characters' fight for physical, ethical, and psychological survival, Karmel probes the possibility of human dignity and moral clarity even under conditions designed to make both impossible. Drawing upon her own experiences of the Holocaust and its aftermath, Karmel's novels explore the human experience, the protean nature of the human self, the complexity of personal relationships, and the limitations of language in depicting the Holocaust.

Ilona Karmel was born in Kraków on 14 August 1925, the second of two daughters of Hirsch and Mita (née Rosenbaum) Karmel. She remained close to her sister, Henryka (later Henia Karmel-Wolfe), until her...