Casualty of war

Luisa Lang Owen's recounting of her childhood and the losses she and others experienced before, during and after the war, including three years in a concentration camp is, at once, both hauntingly beautiful and horrific. Her captors, in seeking to exterminate individuals and their culture ironically distilled, in this young woman, the essence of being. Her lush and loving attention to detail, her artistic perceptions were heightened and strengthened in those years, and what we sometimes refer to as the "strength of the human spirit" is clearly defined in the telling of this woman's coming of age under life-threatening conditions. Both fascinated and saddened by the telling, I felt as if I'd entered the spirit of someone who has always lived and continues to live fully and attentively in the world.