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Part memoir, part detective story, part family history, this is the account of one family's quest for answers; a timely investigation of Poland's attempts to obscure its entanglement in the Holocaust, and a poignant portrait of those who nevertheless remember...

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More Press:

San Diego Jewish World: American Investigative Reporter Probes Cases of Jews Murdered by Poles

Boston Globe Magazine Excerpt: I went searching for a relative who escaped the Holocaust. I found a secret some want to forget.

RI NPR: Author interview: A journalist’s search for a relative who escaped the Holocaust unearths a secret some want to forget

Boston Globe TV: Searching for family holocaust survivors in Poland

USA Today: You can't tell the truth about the Holocaust in Poland. Could that happen in the US?

The New York Times Book Review: The Holocaust in Poland and the Erasures of the Past

The Providence Journal: What really happened to ex-Journal writer's family in WWII? It's a Holocaust murder-mystery

Amazon has consistently listed Jews in the Garden as “Editors’ pick” for best history

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Judy and cousin Sam on an early trip to Poland after the fall of communism. In Sam's hometown, they talked to people old enough to witness wartime events.

Sam translates documents in Polish that Judy obtained, shedding light on relatives' fate.

“Jews in the Garden reads like the best of narrator-guided murder-mysteries. But in this case the who-done-it is real, chilling, and makes clear why today's Polish government is so determined to keep its bloody Holocaust-era secrets.”

LARRY TYE,

New York Times Bestselling Author

About the Author

Judy Rakowsky is a career journalist who grew up knowing little about her family’s Holocaust story. As a young reporter, she got to know Cousin Sam who had just returned from his first visit to his hometown in Poland since the war. Sam is a survivor of the Krakow ghetto and four Nazi concentration camps.

After spending decades covering crime and legal affairs for newspapers, including The Boston Globe and The Providence Journal, one very personal story riveted her: the fate of relatives in Poland. Again and again she traveled to Poland with Sam. In interviews in barnyards and around kitchen tables in the Polish countryside and from official documents they learned the truth of what happened to relatives in hiding. That truth was outlawed in 2018 by the Polish government.