About the Author

Born in 1935 into a religious Jewish family in the city of Czernowitz in what is now part of western Ukraine, Larry Rotenberg’s idyllic childhood in a close-knit, loving family and culturally rich Jewish community was torn apart when Romania joined the Axis and its Jews were brutally ghettoized, then deported on foot to Transnistria.

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Larry survived to enjoy a long and distinguished career in psychiatry. He is well known as a pioneer in humane approaches to mental illness and as an expert consultant in forensic psychiatry, but during Larry’s sixty-plus years of dedicated professional service, only a few family members and close friends knew anything about his harrowing experience as a Holocaust survivor. 

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Now retired, Larry lives with his partner Elaine in Wyomissing, PA, but still travels widely and shares with Elaine a deep love of opera, art, museum-going, and Jewish culture and learning. He continues to participate in numerous professional and charitable societies including the Berks County Medical Society, the Pennsylvania Medical Society, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the Psychiatric Society of Pennsylvania, and the Jewish Federation of Reading/Berks. He is a longtime member of Temple Oheb Sholom in Wyomissing.