Diane Botnick, "Becoming Sarah" (She Writes Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Diane Botnick, "Becoming Sarah" (She Writes Press, 2025)
Host: G.P. Gottlieb
Date: December 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of the New Books Network features a moving conversation with debut novelist Diane Botnick about her forthcoming work, Becoming Sarah. The novel traces the life of Sarah, a baby improbably born and raised in Auschwitz, as she navigates the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust, reinvents herself multiple times, and passes on the burden and memory of survival to her descendants. The discussion explores memory, identity, displacement, the evolution of belonging, and the unique challenges of writing imagined survival in the face of history.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Inspiration and Genesis of Becoming Sarah [03:01]

• Loneliness of the Last Survivor: Botnick describes her original inspiration as the moment she realized there will one day be only one Holocaust survivor left. She reflects on "this incredibly lonely moment in the world."
• Fragmented Identity: Inspired by a Holocaust Museum interview with an orphaned boy, she ponders, "how we survive and how we create our own identity when we have nothing to lean on."
• Novel’s Conception: These threads merge in the imagined life of Sarah, who survives the camps without memory of her past.

Quote:
"It struck me...there was going to come a time, most likely in my lifetime, when there might be, like, one Holocaust survivor remaining on Earth. And they might not even know...And it just felt like this incredibly lonely moment..."
—Diane Botnick [03:06]

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2. Historical Possibility and Fictional Choices [04:24]

• Survivability of Children in Camps: Botnick clarifies that while some infants survived the camps, her depiction leans into magical realism—Sarah’s survival is presented as highly improbable but not impossible.
• Solidarity Among Women: Research revealed that surviving women often protected one another, influencing Sarah's passage from caretaker to caretaker.

Quote:
"I wanted to make sure that this baby was like no other baby. She’s a complete invention. I didn’t want to steal anyone else’s life or pretend I knew this particular person in real life."
—Diane Botnick [05:02]

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3. Postwar Orphanage and Identity Formation [06:15]

• Orphaned Children After Liberation: Sarah travels on a death march and ends up at Bergen Belsen, which becomes a Displaced Persons camp post-liberation. Placement in new families—often non-Jewish, sometimes via informal or black market arrangements—was the lot of many orphans.
• Taking a Name: Sarah receives her name from an adoptive Christian family, blending their surname into her new identity—Sarah Fogel.

Quote:
"There were really no Jewish families to place them with. There were very few Jewish families left in Germany right there. So they would have to go to non-Jewish families."
—Diane Botnick [10:14]

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4. The Shifting Meaning of Survival [10:42]

• Auschwitz as ‘Home’: As Sarah grows, her strongest point of identity is Auschwitz itself; when asked if she’s Jewish, she replies, "I'm Auschwitz." Her lack of memory complicates her own sense of legitimacy as a survivor.
• Impostor Syndrome: Sarah wrestles with the idea of being a ‘fraud’—having the identity of a survivor, but without a conscious memory of the horror.

Quote:
"She ends up feeling kind of like a fraud in a lot of ways, but she doesn’t really know."
—Diane Botnick [12:13]

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5. Love, Family, and Disrupted Morality [12:20], [16:07]

• Romantic Relationships: Sarah has an affair with Sasha, a Russian guard—rooted in her romanticized view of the Russian liberators, and later with her married boss in America, reflecting her uncertain grasp of social and familial norms.
• Parenting in Exile: Sarah’s insecurity about her right to her child and how to parent with no moral inheritance is central, as is her reliance on the community of women to help raise her daughter.

Quote:
"She has no sense of what a family really means. So to disrupt one doesn’t feel...It takes her a while to understand that this is not a good path."
—Diane Botnick [16:30]

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6. Generational Struggles and Assimilation [17:51]

• Malka and Ruthie: Malka is Sarah’s first American-born child; Sarah’s protectiveness is coupled with an emotional detachment that recurs through generations. Ruthie, in contrast, is fully assimilated—unashamed of her roots and able to pursue independent goals.
• The Search for Belonging: Ruthie’s romance with Noah, a charismatic Jewish leader from Chicago, fills an unrecognized existential void and enables her to establish her own chosen identity.

Quote:
"Ruthie...really wants to make her way in the life and become independent, but stay part of a family."
—Diane Botnick [20:13]

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7. Settings and Geography of Displacement [23:15]

• From Poland to New York to Ohio: Botnick’s own familiarity with New York and Ohio grounds the novel in real locations, contrasting with imagined segments set in Poland and Germany.
• Immigration as Reinvention: Each move marks a stage of identity re-forging.

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8. The 100th Anniversary of Auschwitz’s Liberation [25:10]

• Commemorative Climax: The novel culminates with Sarah and fellow survivors on stage for Auschwitz’s centennial. Botnick rejects the “last survivor” trope, instead focusing on collective memory and symbolic closure.
• Generational Impact: Sarah’s granddaughter takes charge of the gala’s technical production—a symbolic convergence of history and future.

Quote:
"There’s no way I can like, basically kill them all off just to get to this last person...I just wanted it to feel like some kind of big opera or something."
—Diane Botnick [26:08]

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9. Looking Ahead: New Work [27:28]

• Current Writing Project: Botnick is working on a new piece—a woman’s life in fragments from first-person perspectives—exploring memory and identity in a new literary style.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “How do I call myself a survivor when I don’t even remember what I survived?”
  —Diane Botnick [11:25]
• “Something occurs to her that sleeping with somebody’s husband is not about friendship.”
  —Diane Botnick [16:50]
• “Walter is the first one that is just simply in love with her. He’s not trying to save her from anything. He’s just trying to be with her and love her.”
  —Diane Botnick [19:11]
• “I just wanted it to feel like some kind of big opera or something...she looks out over the crowd and sees her whole life coming together.”
  —Diane Botnick [27:00]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [03:01] – Botnick on the initial spark for the novel
• [04:24] – Research on camp-born children and invention of Sarah
• [06:32] – Sarah’s journey through displaced persons camps and naming
• [10:42] – The complications of Sarah’s survivor identity
• [12:20] – Sarah’s romantic relationships and moral ambiguity
• [17:51] – Intergenerational relationships: Malka and Ruthie
• [23:41] – Settings: from Poland to the US
• [25:27] – The 100th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation as novel’s climax
• [27:28] – Botnick's next literary project

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Tone & Style

The conversation is simultaneously analytical and compassionate, blending deep empathy for survivor experiences with an honest look at the ambiguities of memory, identity, and inheritance. Both host and author maintain a tone of respect, insight, and openness to the unresolved.

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Conclusion

Diane Botnick’s Becoming Sarah offers an evocative, imaginative journey through survival, memory, and familial legacy, bridged across continents and generations. This interview provides a compelling look into the novel’s creation, the weight of Holocaust memory, and the ethical and artistic choices shaping a narrative that seeks not only to remember but to reckon and look forward.

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Transcript

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It happened in winter. This birth, this unlikely uncelebrated event. A winter that so efficiently branded her with its cold. She was never not cold again. So cold that all the things she might have wished to do over chief among them was to have been born in summer. It happened in Auschwitz. This birth. Auschwitz. Winter. Impossible for a grown up to wake, work, sleep and wake again for a newborn. Miraculous. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And today I'm talking to Diane Botnik about her haunting debut novel, Becoming Sarah. Born in Auschwitz in the summer winter of 1942, she somehow manages to survive. And in 1945, another woman, not her mother, lashes her to her chest for a death march. As the years pass, Sarah is shunted to several places Never feeling at home anywhere. And during the passing fling reinvents herself as an outwardly visible Holocaust survivor. She lives the rest of her life in America, where she passes on the burden of being a survivor to her daughters and granddaughters. And in this novel about identity, memory and belonging. Hi, Diane. Thanks for joining me today.

[D]

Thanks for inviting me. Really excited.

[C]

So what was your impetus for writing this novel, Becoming Sarah?

[D]

Well, there were a couple of threads that went into it. First, I don't know, one day, maybe a decade ago at this point, all of a sudden, it struck me that there was going to come a time, most likely in my lifetime, when when there might be, like, one Holocaust survivor remaining on Earth. And they might not even know. Nobody would likely know. And it just felt like this incredibly lonely moment in the world. And then not too long after, I paid a visit to the museum, the Holocaust Museum. I'm sorry, the Holocaust memorial memorial in D.C. and watched a video of a man being interviewed who had been on a boat to Palestine when he was, he thinks, six or seven. He had no idea what his name was, who his parents were, where he was from. And I sort of put those two lives together, that one last remaining survivor and this young boy who knew nothing about where he came from or where he was headed. And it just got me thinking about how we survive and how we create our own identity when we have nothing to lean on. And I would say that's when I started thinking about this particular character, Sarah, in Becoming Sarah.

[C]

I have heard of babies born in the camps, but not one of survival of this kind. Can you say a bit about how you researched the possible ways a baby might have survived for three years at Auschwitz?

[D]

Yes. This is not a historical novel. I actually came up with the idea thinking more in lines of almost like magical realism in this baby being born and being able to survive. What I found out after doing some research was that there were babies born in the camps. Not many of them lived, but some did. And I wanted to make sure that this baby was like no other baby. She's a complete invention. I didn't want to steal anyone else's life or pretend I knew this particular person in real life. So she is a fabrication. And the idea of her living for three years in a camp is not impossible, but highly improbable. And to me, it's more the magic of her being able to be protected by these women. I did read that while most of the people, that most of the women and children that came to these camps, to the killing camps in particular were immediately sent to their deaths. The women that did survive actually fared better than the men because women know how to share, they know how to comfort each other, they, they know how to protect each other. And so the idea of these women, these strange stranger women that would come together and having this baby pass from one of them to the next grew from that idea.

[C]

Can you talk about how the children. No, first talk about why was she at Bergen Belsen after the war ended. We're in 1947 when she gets the name Sarah. There's many Sarahs. Can you talk about what was going on there?

[D]

Well, she was taken on the long march from Auschwitz to back to Germany towards the end of the war. The Germans were trying to just basically get rid of everyone and cover their tracks. And so to have people in Poland or other, other camps in other countries started getting harder and harder. So they, they left, I don't know, 5,000 people or maybe more there in the camps and took as many. My understanding is that it was almost a choice whether they left with the German soldiers or stayed and they, not many of them survived that trip, but enough to get to Bergen Belsen, which was a concentration camp at the time. And then they left in January. Auschwitz was liberated in January and then 45 and then Bergen Belsen was liberated in April of that same year. So she was there an orphan. And as many, many people that were there who, a lot of them had typhus or other diseases or died of malnutrition or whatever else and. But the ones who were remaining, the, the Brits came in and took care of them and set up Bergen Belsen as a, as a place for displaced persons. So turn right and now there's a.

[C]

Committee trying to place them. But Sarah's difficult. Can you talk about how they're put on display with hopes that somebody would choose them?

[D]

Yeah, I mean I, I don't know really how they actually got rid of all of the population from that camp. They had to clear out the camp. But it did exist for years. And so this was a desperate attempt for the committee, which is a bunch of men from the other. They were also former concentration camp inmates and they became the leaders of this raggedy band of displaced persons and figured out to put, you know, to go to other countries you had to have a connection, you had to have a relative there or someone who could vouch for you or someone who could give you a job. So for a five year old that was going to be pretty impossible. And she wasn't the only orphan in, in that, in that situation. Plenty of babies were born there too, by the way. So what happens is they, they set up a network to kind of through a black market situation, and they got in touch with locals, Germans in, in the area who would take these kids and you know, they'd get ration cards and, and help in, in supporting them. But. And there was no obligation that the children ended up. This is, this is my fiction, by the way. This, that was, this part of it was not based on any research that I did, but I needed to move her to a safe ground and then have her outgrow that safe ground and keep moving.

[C]

But. So that was a little confusing that they, that they. She ended up going with a Christian family. However, she does get her name because they're the Fogelmans and she takes part of that as the name she goes by for the rest of her life. Sarah Fogel. So how would that have. That was just imagination, that I'm sure it happened.

[D]

Just imagination. But yes, I, the. I mean, there were really no Jewish families to place them with. There were I. There were very few Jewish families left in Germany right there. So they would have to go to non Jewish families. And fortunately she found, they found her a safe place for a while. But her, her life isn't meant to be safe, I think.

[C]

So later on when she learns, you know, she grows up a little bit and when people ask her if she's Jewish, she says, she says, I'm, I'm Auschwitz. That's what she knows about herself. In other words, nobody ever taught her what, what it meant.

[D]

She did not know where she came from. She. And, you know, there were lots of streams of people coming into being deported to these camps. And there were a lot of people who were not Jewish. There were the Roma, the. Anybody who was homosexual. Deviants they called them. And also people born in, like Poles who were born in Poland but not supporting the Germans were sent to Auschwitz and places like that as well. So she could have been anything, truly. But I think as horrible as our beginnings are in life, we tend to over time get a sort of nostalgia about it. And I think I saw her seeing Auschwitz as her hometown, basically. And the fact is she's three by the time she's liberated, quote unquote, and really has no memory of the place. So one of her biggest struggles ends up being like, how do I call myself a survivor when I don't even remember what I survived?

[C]

It was a fascinating question, really.

[D]

Yeah. I think she ends up feeling kind of like a fraud in a lot of ways, but. But she doesn't really know.

[C]

And now the years pass and she has an affair, a quick affair with Sasha. Can you say a bit about him?

[D]

Yes. She has created a sort of romantic hero in her mind from childhood because the Russians are who liberated Auschwitz. So to her, even though Auschwitz was her hometown, so to speak, she has this very elevated and romanticized vision of these Russian heroes. So she. She is determined to meet one. And in fact, she does. She meets a guard at the very newly it's not even constructed yet, but the beginning of the Berlin Wall and falls in love.

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[C]

That cup goes a certain way, and Sarah is willing to do any kind of work. Can you address how she manages to raise a baby in such extremely difficult conditions?

[D]

Yeah, right. Well, I'm not sure that I can answer how anyone does it, but we know that there are millions of women around the world that are constantly being put in this position of raising a single child with nothing. She's one of those women. I think of her not just as a Jew or as a Holocaust survivor, but as one of a myriad of immigrants Refugees who are in search of a safe place to land, whether they are just themselves or have a whole family, or in her case, with just this one child. I think for her, it's. The difficulty is not so much in caring for her. She does have a job, and she manages the way she was sort of protected by the kindness of strangers in. In the camps. She has that same ability to have her daughter looked after by more than herself. But I think she also struggles with the fact that, you know, do I deserve this child? Is. Is this, you know, this beautiful child, rightfully mine? So that complicates things for her.

[C]

And now she's in America and she has a job and she has this long affair with her married boss. And it felt like. I was wondering if your message was about. If you raise a child with no sense of right and wrong, there. There are consequences. So what. What was your thinking in having. In the affair?

[D]

Well, it's her first introductory. This job is her second sort of. It's her first career, really. And it puts her in a whole new world. And I think all of it has such newness. And she's always surprised when men. It's not just every man that falls in love with her. I mean, she's not like an astounding beauty or someone that you, you know, a head turner, so to speak. But every now and then a man will just get fascinated by her, and she's pretty much surprised by that. So when it happens, it kind of. She opens up to it and with this gentleman who's a real intellectual and a poet and sort of celebrates her uniqueness and the fact that she was a survivor and she knows that he's married and she knows she's familiar with his wife, but I think she has no sense of what a family really means. So to disrupt one doesn't feel. It takes her a while to understand that this is not a good path and that it's. I think there's. There's a line, something like. It just occurs to her that sleeping with somebody's husband is not about friendship. I mean, it's something other than that altogether.

[C]

Can you say a bit about Malka and her trajectory?

[D]

Yes. Malka is. Well, it's a little complicated to get into her background, but for Sarah, she is the first person that's born in the United States and is again, she. Sarah doesn't feel completely the complete ownership of this child, the complete mother of this child, for various reasons. And so she. But she feels very protective of her in a way that she's never felt like. Like the fact that this isn't her. Her real. Her honest to goodness, real child. She. Malka, is in her care more than just her daughter. And so she feels a deep, deep responsibility to keep her safe and on the right path, even though she might not know what that is.

[C]

We say a bit about Walter now. Does she ever tell him that she loves him? Is love ever brought up?

[D]

It's brought up in the narration, not in her dialogue. I think that's a really interesting point, Kylie. I have to think about that some more, but off the top of my head, I would say that she is not someone that would announce her love, but that opening up to someone else's love to her, which she does with him for the first time, The. The other. The affair we were talking about, it's not about love. It's about some sort of connection and sort of finding a place that makes sense to her. But with Walter. Walter just loves her for who she is. I think the. The two other men in her life always saw themselves as white knights, you know, trying to save her. They saw her as someone that needed saving and they were going to be the great savior. But Walter is the first one that is just simply in love with her. He's not trying to save her from anything. He's just trying to be with her and love her. And she opens to that. And I think that he. Whether he hears the words from her or not, he feels it. You know, it's clear that she does the vote. Love is there.

[C]

And then there's Ruthie, their child. What about her?

[D]

Well, Ruthie is, I think, the first of the girls that is just assimilated and ready to. You know, she's not embarrassed of her mother's accent. She's not. She has a mother and a father. You know, she has a more of a traditional life, really. And I think that that allows her to pursue things that the others. No one else in the. In Sarah's line has even considered yet. You know, she. She really wants to make her way in the life and become independent, but stay part of a family. She wants a family of her own. And she does everything. She makes all the right steps to find that right person for her and become, you know, start her own family unit.

[C]

And then she falls in love with Noah. What about him and his family? They're from Chicago. The rest, let's just say geographically. We're in a lot of different places here. Why don't we. After you talk about Noah, I'll ask you to Go over the geography of the book.

[D]

Yes. Well, Noah, I think, is one of these charismatic characters that sees her in a moment of her vulnerability, Ruthie's vulnerability, and they become. She falls madly in love with him, but it's his finding her and sort of putting her on a kind of a pedestal that I think appeals to her, that opens her up to this. This love relationship. He's. He's a. He's very dynamic, and he. He's not. He's very active in the Jewish community at. At this little college in Ohio. And she is. She knows that there is this Jewish thread in her life, but she's never really. Her mother has never raised her as to be Jewish. Her father is not Jewish by birth, but is a theology professor. So he. He's very interested in her having some sort of faith and understanding of what faith is. But when she meets Noah, when Ruth meets Noah, she, like, is. I think that the idea of him, coupled with this idea of him being a leader in this Jewish community is just so compelling to her. And it gives her this missing. This thing that she didn't even know she was missing her whole life. And so she just grabs onto it and the two make a life together. It's not that she just follows him along, but it's. It's literally a kind of discovery of her own self and needs. And I think he's just the perfect person to. To. It was like kismet, or as we would say, Bechert, that they should.

[C]

So. So she starts in Poland, Sarah starts in Poland, ends up in New York for a while, and then when she marries Walter, they end up in Ohio. So. And then the story is between New York and Ohio because kids are going back and forth, and Ruthie and Noah end up there. Right. So were these all. And so. Oh, Noah's family was from Chicago. So were these all places you were familiar with?

[D]

Yes, the only place I wasn't familiar with. I've never been to Poland or Germany. But she does make a long stop in Italy, in Rome, and leaves for New York. And New York is just the place. That's where I went to college. I couldn't wait to get out of Akron, Ohio, and move to New York. And that was the first place I went for school there. And I spent a long time in the city before I moved up north of the city now. But I grew up in a small. In Akron, Ohio, and knew Kent and Hudson and Stowe, where she lived and worked and went to school in. The kids went to school in Ohio And I knew the Upper west side and New York very well. I spent a lot of time there. So I just, I've never written about Ohio before. Um, so it was kind of an interesting challenge. She, she, Sarah leaves New York because she. Something. Because due to circumstances beyond her control, she decides she needs to find a safer place to be with her family, with her daughter anyway. And she moves, makes that move and just, you know, again meets Walter in a very almost random fashion and he just sweeps her off her feet, basically. So.

[C]

So I don't want to ruin the surprise of what, how you. What else happens in the book, but I just want to ask you about. Can you talk about the hundredth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2045?

[D]

Yeah. I really wanted a moment for.

[C]

For.

[D]

Sarah to be able to connect with, you know, to learn what being a. What being a survivor really means. And so the idea that I, I could not get to the Last Survivor, an agent that I had talked to along the way to publishing had said, oh, the Last Survivor, that's who I could. That's the book I could sell. And I started thinking, great, that sounds like a great idea. And then I started thinking about it and doing research about, like, there isn't even really a number that anyone has quantified about, like, how many survivors there were or who even counts as a survivor. So I thought, oh, my goodness, I. There's no way I can like, basically kill them all off just to get to this last person. And I just, it was. It felt like such bad karma to even think about it. So I. So the idea of having Sarah on a stage with 249 others who were, you know, mobile enough to get there and be on and be there, and she still doesn't feel like she belongs there, but somehow getting up on that stage just makes it feel right. And I just wanted it to feel like some kind of big opera or something. Another one of her offspring, her granddaughter, is in charge of the, the pyrotechnics and the technical part of the gather. The gala or gathering, I should say. And so she feels even more of a reason to be there. And I, I think it's like, it's a way for her to look out over the, the crowd and see her whole life coming together and I hope feeling justified for being there and privileged to be there for the first time.

[C]

It was a powerful moment. So, Diane, what are you working on next?

[D]

Well, I'm working on a piece that is tiny little pieces from each section of a woman's life, possibly this woman that I've divided into four sections right now. And the conceit is that each moment of memory is being cast in that from that point of view of that time. So I'm struggling with it because it's a little hard. But I've never worked with a. I've never done first person before. And I'm kind of. That's my new challenge. So trying to just dig down into my own memory rather than trying to fabricate somebody else.

[C]

It's intriguing. I'm interested. Thank you so much for joining me today, Diane.

[D]

It's been a pleasure.

[C]

I wish you great luck with becoming Sarah.

[D]

Thank you. Thank you very much. And it was nice meeting you.

[C]

And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped mystery series and host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today, I've been talking to Diane Botnik about her poignant debut novel, Becoming Sarah. Hope you all have something poignant to read today. And always happy reading.

[D]

It was really a great conversation.

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