About

Mary Friedmann Berges has lived in Bonners Ferry since the late 1980s, when she and her late husband Harold built their handcrafted log home overlooking the beautiful Kootenai River Valley. She enjoys being close to nature, spending time with her dog Kaila, and playing bridge with friends.

Mary was born in Belgium to her Jewish family, and as a child during the Holocaust she experienced the trauma of living with an alias and the tremendous loss of her parents during World War II. She shares her story of loss and love in her memoir "Finding the Light Within: My Journey of Healing After the Holocaust." See more about her book below.

During World War II millions of Jews were sent to concentration camps and killed during the Holocaust, the German policy to eradicate all European Jews. Thousands of Jewish children survived this carnage, however, because they were hidden by their parents with friends, relatives, and in Catholic orphanages. Many of these children survived and started a new life.

What happened to these children and what were their lives like? This is precisely the story of Mary Friedmann Berges, one such child for whom love was to remain last felt the day her mother left her at a Belgium Catholic orphanage in 1943. Surviving the war after losing her parents to the atrocities of the Holocaust, haunted by anxiety and sadness she did not understand, she persevered through childhood to adulthood to find a place where she belonged. Her discovery of that place is an object lesson in how we can surmount tragedy, will ourselves to change and find fulfillment at any age.

Mary's book, Finding the Light Within: My Journey of Healing After the Holocaust is a fascinating, true account of her experience as a young child in the great atrocity of the 20th Century, and the long path she followed to reclaim her health. You may see more about her book, or order it, at Amazon.com or from her local publishing house, Keokee Books.