"This is a highly unusual and powerful Holocaust survivor memoir of mother and daughter...A remarkable and poignant mother-daughter odyssey." —Christopher R. Browning, Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
— Christopher R. Browning

"Lives Lived and Lost is unique...The mother, Golda Finkler, recalls many specific details, providing a vivid account of life before, during, and after her internment. In addition to her own recollections of survival as a child, Kaja Finkler also brings to bear the insights and skills she gained through her life's work as a professional anthropologist. This book is thus as enlightening as it is moving. I have no doubt, that even those who have no personal connection to Polish Jewry or to the Holocaust will find beauty and insight in this extraordinary story of a mother/daughter relationship." —Deborah Tannen, Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation
— Deborah Tannen, Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You're Wearing THAT?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation

Kaja Finkler (PhD CUNY) is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she had taught for twenty five years. Previously, she taught at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Finkler has published widely in her field: she is the author of five books in her areas of expertise, including her last book Experiencing the New Genetics. Family and Kinship on the Medical Frontier published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and over fifty articles in refereed journals dealing within her specialties, With Lives Lived and Lost she is drawing on personal experience, with the eye of a participant and observer- informed by her anthropological and ethnographic proficiency. Golda Finkler, born into a prominent rabbinical family, was descended from several Hasidic dynasties, and was immersed in and profoundly knowledgeable about Jewish Orthodox life and Hasidism. She was also a feminist, and studied law in the Wszechnica Polska University in Warsaw at a time when very few women, particularly Orthodox Jewish women, attempted such programs. After surviving World War II ghettos and slave labor camps, she arrived in the United States in 1946. She had an exceptional memory, and this book is largely based on the more than 100 audio tapes she left behind upon her death in 1991 describing her life, the spirituality that helped her resist the Germans and survive the war years.