“It is Easter Sunday, April 1945, early in the morning, maybe just dawn. We stand still, like frozen grey statues. Us. Seven hundred and thirty women, wrapped in wet, grey, threadbare blankets, standing in the rain. Our blankets hang over our heads, drape down to the soil. We hold them closed with our hands from the inside, leaving only a small opening to peer out, so that we save the precious warmth of our breath.”
So begins the author’s sojourn, her search for freedom that begins with the chaotic barrenness in which she found herself after her liberation on Easter Sunday, April 1945, and takes her across several continents and half a lifetime.
Raab paints a brief yet moving picture of her idyllic life before her internment and the shock and the horrors of Auschwitz, but it is in the images of life after her liberation, that Raab imparts her most poignant story — a story told in a clear, almost sparse, always honest style, a story of the brutal, and, at times, the beautiful facts of human nature.
This book will appeal to a number of audiences — to readers interested in human nature under the most trying circumstances, to historians of World War II or Jewish history, to veterans and their families who lived through World War II, and to those interested in politics and the evils of political extremism.

Elisabeth M. Raab was born in Hungary in 1921. In 1944 she was deported with her mother, father and daughter to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She alone survived and was liberated by the Americans in 1945. She resided with her family in Toronto until her death in 2016.

Elisabeth M. Raab's profile page

• Winner, Canadian Jewish Book Award for Best Holocaust Memoir
• Short-listed, Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction

It is beautifully written -- very powerful in its eye for detail and the stark simplicity of the narrative style.

June Callwood

Told in hauntingly simple prose, this autobiographical novel describer Elisabth 'Boske' Raab's experiences in Auschwitz and afterwards with what sometimes seems like detachment—the reader only fully realizes the depth of Raab's pain by listening to her silences.... In every silence and behind every word, are faces, voices, and unspoken memories....And Peace Never Came teaches the student and the interested reader that it is too easy, over fifty years later, to rest comfortably in the image of the Holocaust as a story with a beginning and an ending....It is too easy to believe that the pain ended in 1945. Raab's novel insists that we recognize, as children and grandchildren of survivors and persecutors and spectators, that the Holocaust is not simply a 'story'; it does not hold a singular ultimately redeeming 'message' for humanity. The painful legacy left by the Holocaust asks that we listen, that we resist, and that we remain aware. And Peace Never Came allows us that opportunity.

Kate Wood, Canadian Children's Literature, No. 95, Vol. 25:3, Fall 1999