One In Six Million by Amy Fish
Reviewed by Heather McBriarty
Most of us don’t remember what it was like before we had the world at our fingertips, millions of historical records in searchable databases, the ability to find people and create our family trees from our desktop in a very short time. Many of us have had our DNA tested, by a kit that came in the mail, with a report emailed to us a few weeks later. How very different the job was a few short decades ago, and how desperately important yet out of reach it was for so many, such as the child survivors of the Holocaust, separated forever from their parents and families.
Stanley Diamond lived a happy and carefree life in Canada during the war years of the 1940s. By the late 1980s, the retired business owner had the means and the motivation to search for his Jewish-Polish ancestors. He travelled to Salt Lake City, Utah to access the Mormon church’s database. He travelled to Poland, hiring an interpreter and driver, to scour the archives of Polish towns to find long-forgotten family members. Along the way, he became an experienced and accomplished genealogist. Acknowledging the difficulty and expense of his own search, he was inspired to help those who didn’t have the same ability and created one of the first large-scale, searchable Jewish databases of births, deaths and marriages.
Maria Vasitinskaya had been left as an infant by the side of the road in Poland in 1942. Only a small scrap of paper, pinned to her blanket, gave a clue to her identity: her name and birthdate. Saved by a courageous Polish couple, who could have been shot for harbouring what appeared to be a Jewish child, she was raised in Poland and Ukraine as a Christian, before settling in Russia. All she knew was the name of the town where she’d been found and that likely she was Jewish. In 2014, with the clock running out, 72-year-old Maria posted the only picture she had of herself as a small child with her adoptive parents to a Jewish website for reuniting lost Holocaust families. Then she sat down to wait… for a very long time.
In her new book, One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, Montreal writer Amy Fish lays out an incredible story of perseverance, resilience, desperation and hope, that brings Stanley and Maria together in a seemingly impossible quest. Throughout the book, the twists and turns, the triumphs and setbacks, pull the reader through what feels like a detective novel, but the surprises don’t stop coming, even when you think you know the full story.
“One in Six Million — a stark reminder of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust — takes the reader on a journey through one of the world’s darkest and most horrific times.”
One in Six Million — a stark reminder of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust — takes the reader on a journey through one of the world’s darkest and most horrific times. It offers an unflinching look at the vicious cruelty and madness of the Holocaust: Maria’s birth mother was entrained to a concentration camp without bunk houses, where Jews were stripped, gassed to death and burned as soon as they arrived, in an evil kind of production line designed to kill as many people as fast as possible.
And yet, this is an inspiring book brimming with hope and with the generosity of people from all over the world, coming together, without any compensation but a mitzvah - a good deed – chalked up to their name, from the rabbi who flew a DNA sample from Russia to the USA, the anonymous Orthodox researcher in New York, the families in Israel, the owner of a DNA testing company offering free testing, all the way to Stanley Diamond in Montreal. It is a look at the Jewish community’s unflagging mission to reclaim their lost loved ones; it is a lesson in remembrance and memorialization and illuminates their beliefs and struggles to exist over hundreds of years. Fish weaves a riveting tale that only feels like fiction, where so many details needed to line up to reach the conclusion, it seems nearly impossible it could. There is a happy outcome, yet one tempered with the acknowledgement of an irretrievable loss to both Maria and the Jewish people.
About the Author
Amy Fish has been featured on Zibby's Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books and CBC Books to Read. Her writing has also appeared in the Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, and Canadian Traveller. She has three previous books of non-fiction.
Book Details
Publisher : Goose Lane Editions (April 1 2025)
Language : English
Paperback : 216 pages
ISBN-10 : 1773104241
ISBN-13 : 978-1773104249