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Australian journalist Diane Armstrong has written thousands of articles on everything from travel to women's affairs, but it wasn't until a fateful trip to Poland to visit some of her surviving relatives that she decided to turn her investigative eye on her own family history. The result is Mosaic, a vivid, powerful memoir that recounts the experiences of her Jewish-Polish family before, during and after the Holocaust.

Armstrong was born on the eve of the German invasion of Poland that began World War II. Chaos broke out when she was just a baby, as German soldiers began rounding up and ghettoizing Jews, ultimately preparing many of them for deportation to concentration camps. Luckily, Armstrong's parents were able to secure false documents that identified the family as Catholic, and her father, a dentist, managed to set up a practice in a remote village called Piszczac.

Her immediate family survived the war walking on a tightrope, always afraid that they would be discovered as Jews and either murdered or sent to a camp. In fact, the villagers did begin to question their identity and suspect their ethnicity, and were it not for the positive influence of the village priest, they might have been turned in. In the end, the entire village kept their secret, and Armstrongís family survived and eventually emigrated to Australia.

Mosaic is not, however, simply the story of Armstrong's immediate family. It is also an account of the lives of dozens of relatives, including her grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins. Some of these family members died in concentration camps and by other horrific means designed by the Germans; others, like the author's immediate relatives, somehow survived.

Armstrong completed several years of painstaking research for this book, traveling the globe to track down her relatives and record their stories. Many of the most touching moments in the narrative come when her elderly relatives recall both the times before the war, when the world seemed full of promise, and the times during and immediately after, periods they would, of course, prefer to forget. With the skills of an astute journalist and a master storyteller, Armstrong delivers these memories, and in so doing, gives voice to a past that might otherwise have been lost.

Vivian A. Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio.