Dry Tears

This is the true story of Nechama Tec, whose family found refuge with Polish Christians during the Holocaust. Dry Tears is a dramatic tale of how an eleven-year-old child learned to pass in the forbidding Christian world and a quietly moving coming-of-age story. This book is unique celebration of the best human qualities that surface under the worst conditions.


A compelling account. Quite accessible.--Michele Bisbey, St. Vincent College

A beautifully written and poignant account of what it was like for a young girl to be passing as a Gentile in Nazi-occupied Poland.--Evan Hunter

Dry Tears moves me beyond words....[It] conveys an immediate sense of what [living under the Holocaust] was like, and does so strongly, even nobly, without a trace of self-pity....My admiration has no bounds.--Robert K. Merton, Columbia University

Render[s] with such honest yet compassionate detail the struggle of Jews to 'pass' as Christians among anti-Semitic people who sheltered them, loved them, lived off them, and finally, after the war, were ashamed rather than proud of having taken [them] in.--Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University

A story of human resilience...made all the more remarkable because it is seen through the eyes of a young girl who bore herself beyond the promise of her years.--Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, President, Union of American Hebrew Congregations