Mania dreams of becoming Poland's Shirley Temple. She is seven when World War II begins and eleven when she witnesses her mother die in Auschwitz. A year later, she is transferred to the work camp, Reichenbach. Johanne, an SS guard, slips her food and looks out for her, giving her hope that she will survive. Johanne even voices her desire to adopt Mania when the war ends. But when at last it does, they are suddenly separated. As the years pass, Mania often thinks about Johanne and wishes that she could thank her. Then, decades later, their lives serendipitously, perhaps miraculously, reconnect. Mania hires a cleaning lady whom she is sure is Johanne, but the woman elusively denies it.

Lisa Birnie interweaves the true stories of these two remarkable women with her own experience of the war, as she attempts to discover the truth. Her book fearlessly traverses gray areas of war, belief and memory. Will Johanne admit to being the one who saved Mania? Is she deliberately keeping the truth a secret? Or is Mania mistaken? As Mania often says, "Life's full of secrets, and every secret has a purpose."

Praise for In Mania's Memory:

"It's a thorough and satisfying exploration of how two people on opposite sides of a great divide survived an unspeakably grim period of human history." --The Vancouver Sun 

"A fascinating read... It really is a case of fact being stranger than fiction." --The Jewish Independent

"This book is much more than a wrenching story of one woman's survival.  It is also a narrative about the memories of a German woman caught up in the lunacy of the Third Reich in 1938.  It is a thesis on the power of memory. It is a journalistic investigation of archival documentation searching for clarity, truth and validation. It is a travelogue into towns in Poland and Germany 60 years after horrors were committed in their concentration camps and villages. Many stories are woven together in this book - the survival of the child, Mania; the love affair between an attractive   domestic worker and a dashing SS officer: and the reunion between Mania and her alleged rescuer, Johanne. While learning about the lives of Mania and Johanne we also become privy to the delicate interviewing skills and brilliant editorial commentary by Lisa Birnie. A gripping, meticulous and fearless book." --Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre Review

"In Mania's Memory Lisa Birnie captures brilliantly the intersect of memory, the perhaps flawed memory of the victim at age 12, and the near-perfect denial of memory of the perpetrator-guard. This book reads like a superbly crafted suspense novel. But it is not fiction. The Polish-Jewish child Mania's encounter with terror in Auschwitz was documented, the alleged sojourn of her German rescuer, Johanne, as a Nazi guard, is not. Most such  records were destroyed. Being myself a child who survived the Shoah in hiding and who attempts to avoid the trauma of too much Holocaust literature, I was nevertheless totally captivated, even inspired, by this extraordinary tale." --Robert Krell, M.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia

"As the library technician for Patrick Henry High School, San Diego, I was asked for recommendations for something new and insightful for two different departments, History and English. Your book,  'In Mania's Memory', was exactly what we needed. Over 50 copies were ordered. It is unique, informative, and well written, one of my favorites in quite a long time." --Care Kelly, Library Technician, Patrick Henry High School, San Diego, California

Lisa Birnie's profile page

Lisa (Hobbs) Birnie worked for thirty years as a newspaper reporter in Melbourne, London, San Francisco and Vancouver; served full time on the National Parole Board of Canada for nine years; and was a contributing editor to the magazine Saturday Night. She has written ten books, which have included New York Times bestselling titles, and won numerous prizes including a Ford Foundation Fellowship to Stanford University, the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, a Gold from the Canadian National Magazine Foundation. Lisa was a writer-in-residence at Monash University in Melbourne and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. She is eighty-one years old and sees no reason to stop writing.