At various times throughout her adult life in the United States, Katharina Rich Perlow was asked how her family survived World War II in Vienna, Austria. She was reluctant to conjure up the harrowing events of her childhood-until now. As the number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust diminishes rapidly, and for the sake of her children and grandchildren, Katharina felt compelled to tell her story.

Her memoir is the story of six-year-old Katharina, her two older siblings, her Catholic mother and her Jewish father, forcibly moved from a quiet, small-town life into a tiny apartment in the...