Lucette Matalon Lagnado was born in Cairo, Egypt. She is the 2008 recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest cash award in the Jewish book world. As an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has covered health care for a decade. She has been a finalist or received prizes from, among others, Columbia Journalism School, the University of Missouri, and the University of Southern California.

Sheila Cohn Dekel is the widow of Alex Dekel, an Auschwitz survivor.