The poems in Ghost Children explore the spiritual and psychological losses suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. The title points both to the one and a half million children murdered in the Holocaust and to the many child survivors who have lived out their lives as "ghosts," never managing to allow their childhood self to surface in their adult lives. Drawing on her own experience of life as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto and her escape, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz divides her journey of discovery into three sections. She begins by travelling back in memory to witness to the pain and suffering of the Jewish children of Europe. In the second section, she journeys to Europe to visit the concentration camps, ghettoes and towns where Jewish life once flourished. Boraks-Nemetz finds ghosts of the past in the black granite memorials of what once was the Warsaw Ghetto, in the stones in Treblinka, in the trees of Auschwitz, and in her grandparents' Polish garden. She also travels to the Dead Sea and the caves of En Gedi to look for traces of her lost Jewish identity. Ultimately, she points to a place of healing, at a light that burns within the very act of surviving and remembering. In spite of all that has happened, in spite of the admonition that, after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible, Boraks-Nemetz affirms that we must continue the journey.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz was born in Warsaw, Poland, and is a child survivor of the Holocaust. She escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the remainder of the war in hiding under a false identity. Boraks-Nemetz graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature. She is an author of an award winning novel The Old Brown Suitcase followed by The Sunflower Diary and the Lenski File, as well as two volumes of poetry Ghost Children and Garden of Steel. She has translated Polish Emigre poetry into English and has also co-compiled the YA anthology of Canadian Holocaust writing, Tapestry of Hope. From 1980-2016, Boraks-Nemetz worked at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Center. She often speaks to students about the consequences of racism, as a member of the Holocaust Center’s Outreach Program. She is a board member of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada. She lives and works in Vancouver.

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