The first time Sonia Reich was hunted by the Nazis, she was an 11-year-old orphan, seeking refuge in the Polish countryside.

The second time was almost 60 years later, on a quiet street in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill. That time, however, the pursuit was happening solely in her head.

“I received a call at midnight saying that my mother had run out of her house and been picked up by the Skokie police,” said her son, Howard, a Chicago arts critic. Sonia had been screaming that someone was trying to kill her. “I couldn’t even comprehend that,” he recalled. “I thought it was a dream.”

Like many Holocaust survivors, Sonia Reich was not offered therapy after the war, and she never talked about her experiences. She spent five decades as an active suburban mother and wife. But as Sonia entered her 60s, after her husband died, her children began to notice some odd survivalist behavior, such as sleeping with an ax under her pillow and bringing her own water to restaurants. “But we did not connect those behaviors with what she went through as a child in the Holocaust,” Howard Reich said……