Notes From Exile
A memoir of exile, memory, and the courage to break silence.
Inside the Life of a Daughter
Born to Holocaust Survivors
Sabina Baral was born in postwar Wrocław (formerly Breslau), a city rebuilt from German ruins and resettled by Poles after World War II. The only child of Esther Goldman and Zygmunt Binder, quiet, hardworking Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a home shadowed by loss yet determined to rebuild a normal life.
In 1968, at the age of twenty, Baral was forced to leave Poland with her parents during the state-led campaign that drove thousands of Jews into exile. Their route led through Vienna and Rome before they eventually resettled in the United States, where she built a new life far from the streets of her childhood.
For many years, the pain of that rupture remained unspoken. Notes from Exile is the book Baral “wrote for myself, for you, and as a warning,” a deeply personal act of remembrance and a refusal to let her parents’ story, and the story of Polish Jews of 1968, be erased.
A Look Inside Notes From Exile
In 1968, the Polish government gave thousands of Jews a brutal choice: sign away your citizenship or lose your future. At twenty, Sabina Baral watched her parents pack up their lives in Wrocław and step into exile.
Notes from Exile follows their path through Vienna and Rome to America, capturing the fear, absurdity, and dark humor of becoming “unwanted” overnight. It’s a family story, a coming-of-age journey, and a clear-eyed look at what happens when a country turns on its own.
News and Updates
Leaving Home Forever: The Silent Tragedy of Poland’s 1968 Exodus
History has a way of silencing pain, not by erasing it, but by letting it fade beneath layers of political