"Dry Tears" is an autobiographical recollection of life in wartime Poland, during the Holocaust. Not only did the author and her sister have to "pass" as non-Jews and live in constant terror of being caught, they also had to worry about their parents, who couldn't "pass" and who lived in hiding.

I've read perhaps a dozen books by Holocaust survivors. This may be the first time that I thought about each individual murder as that: an individual murder, and not as genocide. What happened to the girls' governess in the early pages of the book left me more sleepless than anything since "Anne Frank."

Sometimes, however, there are the occasional winners in a war. The author's family survived as an intact unit. That, dear readers, is a victory.

This book belongs in every historian's library, be it public or personal. Deeply moving, it's not too much for a mature teen to read, and I will be suggesting it to a friend's young adults.

"Dry Tears" will haunt me for a long time.