OUT OF HIDING

The memoir of Holocaust survivor Gruener, who spent much of the war in hiding and has gone on to ensure it will not be forgotten.

In the 1930s, in what was then Lvov, Poland, Luncia Gamzer is born to Jewish parents. Luncia, a brown-haired, light-skinned girl, is a happy child, but when she’s 5, Germany’s invasion of Poland destroys her world. Could young Luncia have foreseen the eventual extermination of most of Lvov’s 200,000 Jews? As Gruener writes, “you can see the truth in hindsight but not as it’s happening in the moment.” Luncia’s awful wartime experiences seem almost benign compared to the horrific experiences of Jack Gruener, the boy who’d one day become her husband, which are lightly fictionalized in Prisoner B-3087 (2013), co-authored by both Grueners and Alan Gratz, who contributes the foreword to this title. She starves in a ghetto, she’s helpless while her extended family members are murdered, she starves again while hidden by family friends. When the Soviets liberate Lvov, she becomes a displaced person, trying to be normal after a childhood hiding, silent, in the dark. It doesn’t take Luncia long to relearn how to walk and talk, but that’s the easy part. This blunt, important history is less about the Holocaust itself and more about its aftermath for a traumatized refugee girl becoming a young woman in America after a multiyear wait for visas. She changes her name to Ruth, but becoming an American teenager who understands “fun” is more complicated than a name change.

Accessible, vital, and timely.