“Edward Reicher recorded his Holocaust nightmares from the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw to the chilling attempts for his family to live as Aryans in a world of blackmail, informants and circumcision checks. . . . ‘This book has no literary pretensions,’ he writes. ‘It is the description of the life of a Jewish doctor who survived the worst years.’ Yet it’s far more than that . . . Country of Ash is worth reading because the riveting survival drama is framed by larger questions.”