A Novel Idea to Tell a Survivor’s Story

As a young girl, Tema N. Merback noticed that she had almost no relatives on her mother’s side of the family. Two cousins, and that was it. The curious youth began asking questions, and soon learned her mother was a Holocaust survivor.

“I remember every weekend getting into bed, and I would ask her questions, and about an hour later we would be sobbing our eyes out,” said Merback, a Malibu resident. “But it washed her clean, and it got it all out of her, and she was able to live her life in a more positive manner.”

Merback has taken her mother Dina Frydman Balbien’s story, and turned it into a novel titled “In the Face of Evil.” She said she decided to do it this way because she “wanted to do something that was a little different than what everyone else has done so I could show her story in a different manner.”

The book begins with then-10-year-old Balbien’s life in Poland during the summer of 1939, just before the Nazis invaded the nation, beginning World War II. Balbien is soon sent to a ghetto, followed by various camps, and she experiences horrors and miracles over a six-year period. 

“My mother gave me the skeleton for the story, and I filled it with flesh and blood, and gave it life,” Merback said.

Balbien several times faced death. In one instance, when her ghetto was liquidated, and most of the people living in it were sent to gas chambers to die, she lived because she was in a hospital at the time due to a hand injury she had received in the shipping factory where she worked. Balbien could have been killed because of the injury, but the factory owner saved her because she looked like his daughter.

“My mother survived through strength and resolve, but also through little miracles,” Merback said.

The Holocaust has been a topic in many movies and books. Merback said her mother’s story was still important to tell because every survivor’s story is worth hearing.

“They’re all worth publishing or writing down,” Merback said. “It’s very important that these stories are recorded because these people are dying. Ten years from now, they’re almost all going to be gone, and they won’t be able to tell their stories anymore.”

Merback and Balbien will be at the at 5:45 p.m. for a book signing and reading. The website for the book is www.inthefaceofevil.net.