Since the publication of Bitter Freedom, we have discovered that Jozef's grandson, Meyer Elazar Berger, has become an Orthodox Jew in Israel.
Bitter Freedom, published in 2006, tells the remarkable story of a Jewish family's survival under Nazi occupation in Poland, with the help of a heroic Polish mechanic named Jozef Zwonarz. The manuscript for the book was written in 1959 and laid away. The author's daughter, Rena Wallach Bernstein, the sole surviving Jewish child from the Sanok/Lesko region of Galicia, in Southeastern Poland, found the manuscript and published it.
"...one of the most compelling first-person accounts by a Holocaust survivor that I have ever encountered."
Nelson E. Breen,
Emmy Award-winning writer and director
