Out of Silence

The story of one man s journey through three generations and five continents to find and heal a past he didn't know existed. In 1997, Martin Beck Matustík made a dramatic discovery at the age of forty: he was the child of a Holocaust survivor. His mother s shocking secret came from the most unlikely of places shoeboxes full of her literary and personal archives. These dramatic revelations changed his life forever and set him on a path to discover his true identity. His research unveiled his mother s remarkable life and the truth behind her painful decision to reject her Jewish heritage and keep it hidden from her family. Matustík's Out of Silence is an intensely personal Czech-Slovak-American Jewish journey into the past to understand the present and find hope for the future. Dealing with self-transformation, loss, memory, recovery, and the unsettling reality of living with multiple identities, Matustík s exhaustive research and selfless prose offer other children of survivors and the world at large a remarkable look inside one man s endeavor to repair the shattered map of his identity.