A Ballad by Johannes Brahms

Susanne Friedlander was born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Her happy childhood came to an end with the Anschluss of Austria and Nazi Germany in March 1938, the destruction of the family unit and the forced transport of her father to an unknown destination. The book explores Susanne′s journey as she traces her Jewish ancestry through the changing times of Imperial Vienna in an effort to make sense of the influences of the Enlightenment, anti-Semitism, assimilation, intermarriage, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Stimulated by the experiences of survivor guides at the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne, she reflects on war and liberation, and describes her painful discovery of what really happened to her gentle, musical father and his brothers, all murdered in 1942.