Judy Rakowsky is a career journalist who grew up in Ohio knowing little about her family’s Holocaust story. As a young reporter she got to know Cousin Sam, a survivor of the Krakow ghetto and Nazi concentration camps who married in Israel after the war and then raised a family in Ohio.

 

She spent decades on deadline, covering crime and legal affairs for newspapers, including The Boston Globe and The Providence Journal. She covered major trials and produced countless page one stories. But one story riveted her:  the fate of relatives in Poland.  She traveled again and again to Poland with Sam, seeing how he came to terms with his own experiences and the challenges and fruits of the search. Describing those discoveries -the true history of what happened to these relatives -was outlawed in 2018 by the Polish government.

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