"I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived."

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Helen Epstein traveled from America to Europe to Israel, searching for one vital thin in common: their parent's persecution by the Nazis. She found:

• Gabriela Korda, who was raised by her parents as a German Protestant in South America;
• Albert Singerman, who fought in the jungles of Vietnam to prove that he, too, could survive a grueling ordeal;
• Deborah Schwartz, a Southern beauty queen who—at the Miss America pageant, played the same Chopin piece that was played over Polish radio during Hitler's invasion.

Epstein interviewed hundreds of men and women coping with an extraordinary legacy. In each, she found shades of herself.