The Radcliffe Biography Series

The Alchemy of Survival:
One Woman's Journey

John E. Mack, M.D.
with Rita S. Rogers, M.D.

Rita Rogers, child of the Bukovina, the once idyllic heartland of Eastern Europe, was deported by the Nazis to a transport camp in the Ukraine. There, still a young teenager, she saved her family from death camps by impersonating a foundry worker. After years of stateless limbo as a refugee and hair-raising escapes from two Communist regimes, she survived to use her experiences as a child psychiatrist to heal both individual and international conflict.
     In this singular collaboration, John E. Mack, psychoanalyst and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of T.E. Lawrence, and Rita S. Rogers together tell the story of her life and explore the mystery of human survival.
     Both biography and autobiography, The Alchemy of Survival is a unique addition to the literature of the Holocaust as well as a deeply inspiring story.


“A sensitive portrayal of a courageous psychiatrist's life, and as well, a social history of the twentieth century, through the rendering of one woman's moral and psychological determination to persist, no matter what the odds.”
— Robert Coles, M.D.

“An extraordinary life story, movingly told in the dual voices of narrator and subject, of the crucial twenty-year slice of interwoven personal and East European history.”
— Viola Bernard, M.D.,
    Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry,
    College of Physicians and Surgeons,
    Columbia University.

“Extraordinary work ... Rita's life is a paradigm, for individuals and nations, of the transmutation of conflict and suffering into workable existence and coexistance. Superb.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Gives a human dimension to this most dreadful of episodes and, in doing so, makes feeling replace numbness.”
— Joseph P. Lash,
    author of Eleanor and Franklin

“Fills many gaps in the story of Holocaust experiences. . . Most of all, the book captures the greatness of human beings, the grandeur of one's potential and fulfillment in spite of tragedy and life's most cruel vicissitudes.”
— Tess Wise,
    Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center

“A unique book among the many that have been written by and about survivors of the Holocaust.”
— Anna Ornstein, M.D.,
    University of Cincinnati Medical School

“A fascinating story of the survival of one remarkable woman through the many terrible transformations of wartime central Europe.”
— Dorothy Hodgkin, Ph.D.,
    Nobel Laureate in Chemistry




About the Authors

John E. Mack, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a member of the Nobel Prize-winning board of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and author of A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Pulitzer Prize, 1976) and Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl.

Rita Stenzler Rogers, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, a practicing child psychiatrist, and the author of many papers in psychiatry and foreign affairs.

Published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company