The River of Angry Dogs, by Mira Hamermesh

A secret history of mourning and survival

Mira Hamermesh is a film-maker and artist. Now in her seventies, she reveals in this book a secret history which is a welcome addition to the memoirs of women Holocaust witnesses. Hamermesh ran away from her parents in Nazi-invaded Lodz, in Poland, refusing to accept the impending horror. Teenage Mira comes over as a precocious girl with great chutzpah, which led her to make a run for it.

At the core of the book is the terrible moment when she abandons her parents. Her mother's words in 1939 were "If we die, we die together." Young Mira didn't agree and her father encouraged her escape . Her mother's wail, "I will never see you again," haunts the memoir.

Years later, when Hamermesh is giving birth in London, she longs for her dead mother, transferring this emotion towards an image of Titian's Madonna and Child on the hospital wall. The prism of mixed Catholic and Jewish cultures suffuses the narrative, reflecting the diversity of pre-war Lodz.

Her fractured narrative rarely focuses on her own story; rather, she is the conduit for others'. Here the book becomes really intriguing. Hamermesh's gift is to evoke the attraction-repulsion of Polish and Jewish lives. During the Sixties, she studied at the Lodz film school and heard experiences which deserve to be movies. Her Polish Catholic lover's mother, Dr Krystyna, hid a Jewish girl, Ania, during the war. However, Ania became a devout Catholic and absorbed the Church's anti-Semitism. When distant family tried to reclaim her, she was traumatised to learn that she was Jewish. Hamermesh layers this story with detailed understanding.

One of the most extraordinary survival stories is that of Hamermesh's friend, Fredka. She hid with a Polish family, where she was raped both by father and son. Both made her pregnant. At the Nazi defeat, she learnt that her "protectors" had also murdered her parents.

This collection of vignettes explores Hamermesh's deracination, and also offers other portraits: for instance, she struck up a friendship with Assia Gutman, later the suicidal lover of Ted Hughes. Hamermesh has a strong sense of the absurd. She describes returning to her childhood flat in Lodz only to be insulted and refused entry by Poles living there. Complaining to the authorities, she returns with a military escort. The new tenants suddenly shift from anti-Semitic diatribe to overbearing obsequiousness. Hamermesh sharply captures the mood of Communist Poland from the point of view of a Jewish returnee. Her writing is cool and detached, and this "alienation effect" is very disturbing.

Bruno Bettelheim teaches us that the inability to mourn freezes the psyche, but this book offers catharsis. Hamermesh's father was murdered in Auschwitz and, when the adult Mira went inside a gas chamber to mourn him, she suffered spontaneous bleeding from nose and vagina. This shocking image is the kind of release, and blood-mourning, which permeates every page.