Where Are We Going

The inspiring true story of a courageous Jewish family's escape from the Nazis and survival against all odds. In this action-packed memoir that reads like a novel, the author recounts the severe hardship that she, her sister, and parents, Markus and Rena Finder, endured as they escaped Krakow, Poland, in September 1939, just ahead of the advancing Nazi invaders. They survived imprisonment in a Siberian Gulag and near-death illness and starvation on their courageous and harrowing three-and-a-half-year odyssey through Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, and the Nazi submarine-infested Indian Ocean, before finally securing freedom in Palestine in 1943. The author subsequently became an M.D. and practicing psychoanalyst in Los Angeles. When she returned to Poland in 2001 as a representative of the International Psychoanalytical Association to assist in the formation of a new psychoanalytic institute in Warsaw, she used the opportunity to explore the history of the Jewish community in Krakow, where her family had resided for hundreds of years. This visit compelled her to finally write down the details of her family's incredible survival story, as a tribute to her parents' tenacity, resourcefulness, and courage. Throughout this unique memoir she skillfully integrates how their escape was impacted by major events during the first three years of WWII with legendary, often recounted family stories about how they managed to endure against all odds. Where Are We Going? promises to be a page-turner for lovers of fact-based action/adventure, World War II, and Holocaust stories. "A trained psychoanalyst, Tasini does an admirable job of reconstructing the narrative of her own survival, along with that of her sister and parents, Markus and Rena; and her aunt, uncle and cousin, who shared this long struggle. She was but a young child, and her direct memories of the events she lived were few, but that did not hamper her as a writer and storyteller. She clearly had absorbed the stories of family lore. She had listened in detail to the family histories, and she knows how to write."-Jewish Journal of Los Angeles MIRIAM FINDER TASINI, MD, a practicing psychoanalyst, is a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at L.A.'s New Center for Psychoanalysis who is currently serving as President of the American College of Psychoanalysts.