GOOD IN THE MIDST OF EVIL

A Polish-born Holocaust survivor recounts her broken childhood in this memoir.

Dana Fast, with the collaboration and encouragement of her daughter, Yvona, delivers a penetrating and emotionally resonant portrait of a childhood during a tragic era in global history. She was born around 1930, and for the first five years of her life, she and her parents, a bookkeeper and a fabric seller, lived through the Great Depression in her well-off grandfather’s apartment in Warsaw. Being a challenging time for employment “especially for a young Jew” like her father, Fast notes that her prewar world was full of “happy, carefree times.” Soon, her brother, Jurek, was born and she ended up spending her days with her aunt and the family maid, whom she saw as her “second mom.” Fast recalls overhearing rumors of war from adults that became a harsh reality in 1939 when the German army crossed Poland’s western border: “My childhood ended and I grew up in one day,” Fast writes in a dramatic account of that horrifying first day in September. The family packed and fled east, but soon they faced sprays of bullets as they hid in dense potato fields. After retreating to Warsaw, Fast lived with members of her extended family who shared fears of the increasing antisemitism as food rationing, harsh prohibitions, and German reprisals became commonplace in an established ghetto, where overcrowding, starvation, and disease ran rampant. The memoir’s details grow darker as Fast diligently describes the ghetto’s forced “liquidation” in 1942, as her father desperately hatched a breathtaking escape plan for his children. The author’s unfaltering bravery saved her and her brother’s lives as she, in a religious orphanage, identified herself as Danka, a Catholic girl from eastern Poland. Her joyous account of her eventual reunion with her family effectively intermingles with heartbreaking earlier scenes of cruelty at the hands of German soldiers. Fast’s memories are vividly embellished with photographs that range from softly nostalgic family portraits to harrowing scenery in her Nazi-occupied homeland.

A poignant and unforgettable wartime remembrance of lost innocence.