Not All Was Lost

IRENA BESSETTE (BAKOWSKA), was born as Irene Borman in 1924 to two Jewish dentists in the heart of the Jewish section of Warsaw. She was two years younger than her older sister who also survived the war and the Holocaust with her, as told in Not All Was Lost: A Young Woman’s Memoir, 1939-1946. Irene now lives in Portland as does her son whose birth under German occupation is also part of this story. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, Irene was just 15 and her sister Karolina was 17. In this story we follow a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl and how she survived and lived, matured and became a woman through the tragic years of World War II and the Nazi Occupation. Millions of people perished, millions were wounded, and countless property was destroyed. Yet the author affirms that not all was lost. How was it possible? To answer this question, the reader is taken on a journey through that time to Warsaw, bombed mercilessly for twenty-six days. After the Occupation began, the reader observes the daily life of the Jewish people under Nazi rule. How did they behave? How would the reader behave under such circumstances? Was it possible to remain sane while imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto? Was it possible to escape? Readers will meet some Christian Poles who did help, and will be touched by the hardship of those slaving on German farms in Lorraine where Irena and her sister hid and labored. It was a cruel time, a time of agony, a time of tears, a time of pain. It was a time of heroic courage, a time of enormous endurance, a time of faith. Irene’s liberation by the American army in Lorraine leads her back to Poland, where she finds her parents still alive. Ultimately on in her post war journey, away from Poland, to France to Morocco, educated as a lawyer in France, and as a librarian and lawyer in the United States and eventuality to Canada, where at Queens University in Kingston Ontario, her bi-lingual and bi-legal education proved to be a desired asset . She was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1966, to practice before the United States Supreme Court in 1970, and to the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario Bar) in 1985. She spent the last two decades of her professional career as a Professor of Law and Law Librarian at Queen’s University, Faculty of Law, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, married to Gerard Bessette, a well known and much prized French-Canadian writer and teacher. In honoring her service, this is what Queens University said about her, Madame Irene (Bakowska) Bessette. A courageous survivor of terrible persecution during World War II; a published author of moving, astonishingly generous and enlightened works on her WW II tribulation; a legal scholar of a wide-world experience in Europe, Africa and North America; a patient, dedicated and wise conservator of her adopted country Canada’s legal literature; the first woman teacher at this Faculty of Law; a teacher of and guide to both of Canada’s founding legal traditions; an insightful life partner and strength to her husband Gérard Bessette a Canadian literary treasure. And life continues. Not all was lost. Her book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and can be ordered at your local book store – see www.irenebessette.com.