Nothing Really Bad Will Happen

Winner of the 2024 Richard G. Tomlinson Literary Award.

Three generations. One hidden history. A family shaped by what couldn't be said.

Vienna, 1938. Six-year-old Doris Lichtenthal flees the only home she has ever known. Her mother, Rose, grips her hand as they board a ship for New York-alone. Doris's father, Paul, has already been arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Her grandfather, Sigmund, a respected Jewish hatmaker with a thriving shop, stays behind, believing he still has time. He doesn't.

Doris rarely speaks of what came before. She builds a life in America-marriage, children, forward motion-but the past remains: folded into silences and careful omissions.

Decades later, great-granddaughter Deborah Holman begins asking questions. Through letters, archival research, and family memory, she reconstructs what happened-and what it cost-when survival demanded silence.

Inside you'll find:

• A meticulously researched family story rooted in documents and letters

• Vienna-to-America displacement and the long afterlife of trauma

• A modern genealogical investigation-and what the records still don't say

• An epilogue on the reparations process and its real-world impact

For readers interested in:

• Holocaust memoir and family history

• Genealogy and archival discovery

• Intergenerational trauma, silence, and survival