The emotional toll of silence and victimhood, rendered through intimate detail and rich historical context.
Through the stories of three fortunate Jewish girls—one Polish, one French, one Dutch—the author reveals “hidden children” as an unexplored facet of Holocaust research.
A versatile writer known for his Harvey Blissberg mysteries and other offbeat works (A Buffalo in the House: A True Story of a Man, an Animal and the American West, 2007, etc.), Rosen enters the lives of these three girls and others hidden at enormous peril during World War II. The three made their getaway from Nazi persecution with the help of Christians, and they were instructed in how to be quiet, obedient and confused about their identities. Five-year-old Selma Schwarzwald and her mother, Laura, were able to escape the Lvov ghetto in 1942 after husband Daniel bought them Christian identification papers before he was taken away and never heard from again. The resourceful mother grilled her fair-haired daughter on their new identities, as well as on the Catholic catechism, and fled to Krakow, then to Leming, where Laura, with her fluent German, found work translating for an SS man. Six-year-old Flora Hillel, at school in Nice, France, did not raise her hand in class in September 1943 when the teacher asked which children were Jews. Her fearful mother promptly deposited her in a Catholic monastery, where she received rigorous religious training and later lived with and was adopted by a French-Swedish couple and became Flora Hogman; she never heard from her mother again. Carla Heijmans moved around from one safe house to another with some of the remaining family members, much like the family of Anne Frank—except the Heijmans were not found out, and thus Carla carried the guilt of surviving when two-thirds of Europe’s Jewry did not. Rosen examines how the lives of these hidden children turned out; many survivors went into “helping professions” and never spoke of their experiences.
The emotional toll of silence and victimhood, rendered through intimate detail and rich historical context.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229710-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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