Chasing Shadows (Book)

The only autobiographical book to appear from Rabbi Hugo Gryn, whose death in 1996 was an occasion of great sadness for millions. Compiled and edited by his daughter, Naomi Gryn, it

offers a compelling portrait of one of Britain's best-loved spiritual figures and broadcasters.

Hugo Gryn was born in the Carpathian town of Berehovo (Beregszasz), in what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1930. Berehovo was distinctly Jewish in its ambience and proud of its many synagogues and cultural heritage. In 1938 the Hungarians moved in and the life of the town and the Gryn family changed for ever. In 1944 Hugo and his family were forced into a ghetto and six weeks later transported to Auschwitz. Separated from his mother and younger brother, Hugo and his father were used by the Nazis as slave labourers and survived two death marches.

After liberation, Hugo returned home to find a town whose vibrant Jewish community had been destroyed, a town where there remained only 'a small handful of survivors, dispirited, most of them waiting in vain for the return of other members of their families'. Miraculously, one of those survivors was his mother; he brought her the tragic news that his father had died just a few days after the arrival of Allied troops.

Soon after Hugo left Berehovo in 1945 it became part of the Soviet Union and he never thought he would see it again. Until the arrival of glasnost, the town was closed to visitors from the west. In 1989 Naomi persuaded her father to make an emotional return to Carpathia to make a film about his childhood. Later he was encouraged to write more about his family and the traumatic experiences of his teenage years, but it was a work he never completed. After his death, locked away in a drawer in

his office, Naomi found the pages of another abandoned account of the Holocaust, written in the voice of a puzzled thirteen year-old, which Hugo had begun in 1951.

Chasing Shadows brings

together these two pieces

of writing to form a major

autobiographical work, and

wonderful record of a vanished

world.

(Viking/Penguin UK 2000)