Book Description

What begins in the Warsaw Ghetto...will find the music of your heart. There are secrets in one's life that when revealed change the lives of all around. A REQUIEM FOR HANIA is a story of secrets and a story of who we are, who we were once meant to be. Inspired by a true story, based purposely on musical form, the novel follows three primary characters' journeys: In 1942, Hania Stern, a young Jewish girl, and her family are caught up in the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hania survives when so many others do not survive, escaping when others do not escape. But escape is not release. Hers is the story of a soul lost, and a soul found.In 1968, Pawel Weisz, an avant-garde composer and teacher in Warsaw, knows little of his own past; what he does know he denies. At a time of great protest, anti-Semitism and attempted change in a Communist state at a crossroads, Pawel falls in a forbidden love with a radical young Jewish violinist. But the repressive State and the times in which the two men find one another prevent any real possibility of such. Theirs is a love discovered too late, leading to loss, to great pain, to exile...while in the shadows State Security watches and waits.And in 2006, Agniezka Janiec, an actor in Warsaw, seeking herself through her art, discovers at the death of her grandmother, Hannah Kielar, secrets that push her into a journey of self-discovery: about her Grandmother, about Warsaw in the Ghetto years, about where she comes from and who she is. About those lost, and those found.A REQUIEM FOR HANIA is a story of identity, of loss, of rediscovery. It is a story about friendship, about music that illuminates our common humanity, about the pain of the past and the potential for the present and for the future. It is finally a story of where we all come from, who we are...and where we ultimately are going as we find ourselves, as we grieve and as we celebrate.