SOURCE: "Separation and Survival," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4066, March 6, 1981, p. 250.

Pryce-Jones is an Austrian-born English novelist, biographer, and historian. In the following review of When Memory Comes, he addresses the lasting effects on Friedländer of having lost his parents to the Nazis.

Forty years have passed since the events described in Saul Friedländer's infinitely sad and haunting memoir [When Memory Comes]. His parents separated themselves from him in Hitler's Europe; they died, he lived. The fear of being abandoned still rises in him. What experience, or history itself, has taught him is this fear, fear in its pure state, more terrifying than successive encounters with death. Forty years on, he has become a well-known professor of history in a university in Israel and can look back on what happened with a scholar's knowledge of causes and effects, weighing evidence and motive, using all the...