please read/review/recommend!

[Tammy]

Hello,

You can find out all about the book on my web site www.tammybottner.com

The book recounts the way my grandparents came to live in Belgium, where they met and married in 1939. My 17 year old grandmother Melly became pregnant immediately, and gave birth to my dad on April 23, 1940 - just a couple of weeks before the Nazi occupation of Belgium.

What ensued was a sinister game of hide and seek, as the Nazis progressively closed ranks on the Jewish population. In 1942 my grandparents made the unthinkable decision to send their 2 year old son into hiding, alone. He spent the next two and a half years hidden in a lonely Belgian convent. His little sister, born in 1943, was given up for adoption to a Catholic family. They did not know she was Jewish, nor that her parents would show up two years later to collect her.

Miraculously they all survived. The heartache and trauma of what they all endured, however, was etched into their DNA. As a physician I touch upon epigenetics: the way life events modify our genes. We now know that these genetic changes are passed along to subsequent generations - like me. When my own son was born, I experienced what felt like flashbacks of being hunted by the Nazis, the very experience my grandmother had had decades earlier and thousands of miles away.

My book is unusual in that I wrote about a third of it in the first person, from my grandmother Melly’s point of view. This makes the book very accessible. Quite a few people have contacted me to say they couldn’t put it down, and read it in one sitting.

I hope you will enjoy the read, and i thank you for your helping me promote this deeply personal but also universally relevant book.