Nancy Heart

Nancy Heart (formally Anna) decided as a small child that she would write a book about the mother who beat and abused her every day of her life and the voice in her ear that helped her survive. The book is called Whispers, Sinners and Saints.

Whispers, Sinners and Saints is a multigenerational story of heartbreak, horror, trauma, abuse—and perseverance. At the center are Anna, born in New York in 1959, and her mother, Ann, a Hungarian woman who immigrated to the US in 1957.

Ann was twelve when the Nazis ordered the slum where she’d grown up to be the designated ghetto for all Jews. During that year, most of Ann’s family would disappear or be killed. Her means of survival became the streets, where she removed clothing from corpses and snatched items left behind by those taken to concentration camps. Young Ann witnessed murders, torture, and persecution.

After Anna was born, Mother Ann shared the atrocities she’d endured by physically beating them into her daughter. Ann swore to make her child “pay for all the wrongs done to me in life,” while Anna promised to “grow up and never be like my mother.”

Miraculously, at five months old, baby Anna found enduring salvation through an omniscient connection, All Knowing. Yet, Anna craved a human saint to save her. But who? And where would they come from?