Little Girl Lost

When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zdun´ska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. After the war, Betty and her husband fled from the Polish Communist regime and eventually immigrated to Toronto. Rich’s poetic memoir, Little Girl Lost, is “a montage of graphic snapshots and moments in motion… both testimony and a meditation on what it meant to her sense of self to endure and survive as a young woman growing into adulthood in exile.”
When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zdun´ska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. After the war, Betty and her husband fled from the Polish Communist regime and eventually immigrated to Toronto. Rich’s poetic memoir, Little Girl Lost, is “a montage of graphic snapshots and moments in motion… both testimony and a meditation on what it meant to her sense of self to endure and survive as a young woman growing into adulthood in exile.”