What We Are Reading: Fiction

One of the impetuses for this group was a discussion that began after a review of The Librarian of Auschwitz. You can read the second half of the discussion on my 2021 thread. We talked about "based on a true story" novels, the sensationalizing of the Holocaust, and the role of fiction in Holocaust literature. I then found the following article which offered interesting insights on that topic:

The Holocaust's Uneasy Relationship With Literature
By Menachem Kaiser
in The Atlantic
December 28, 2010

What do you think about Holocaust fiction? Do you have any favorite novels or authors that represent the best of Holocaust fiction?

This review of a little known book does not sensationalise the Holocaust, but does demonstrate the effects on those that survived.

Adeline Yzac - Le Jardin de Jeanne
Le Jardine de Jeanne was published in 2005 and it garnered some good reviews, but it appears to have been forgotten or not read by the general public. This was my latest selection from my local library and because it has been little read, I felt that in a curious way the book had been written just for me to read. The book is taken up for the most part with an interior monologue of Jeanne Jeanette which added to the feeling of a personal story.

We first see Jeanne as she arrives at a small station to catch a train. She is a small thin woman of 60 years of age and she is flustered and she is late. She is unsure of herself and hesitant in everything that she does. It takes her several pages of the book just to get onto the train. When she eventually gets into the empty compartment she searches around for the seat in which she feels more comfortable and then her story starts. She is worried, fussed and scared about her train journey, she constantly plays and rearranges her large handbag in which she keeps three dolls and her life story is slowly revealed by flashbacks set off by the journey. She is a woman who has rarely left the house in which she grew up, unmarried with her only friends being the family with whom she lives. She spends most of her time working in the garden and she is worried about leaving it uncared for while she spends the day away from the house. Apart from shopping trips she has only ventured further away on two other occasions in her life. More information is revealed as she struggle to make herself comfortable; constantly fidgeting. She was adopted by the family when she was three, this was 1944 and she is Jewish. She did not realise that she had been adopted until 1968 when a researcher from Amsterdam looking into displaced Jewish people after the war visited her family and told them all about Jeanne (real name Judith) and the story of her family during the Shoah.

Jeanne has reluctantly taken the train journey to visit a solicitor who has papers for her to sign as a result of a legacy left to her. When the man from Amsterdam visited the family back in 1968 Jeanne was horrified, because she wanted nothing to disturb her quiet life looking after her extensive garden. The train journey reveals more memories for Jeanne to process, memories that she has buried in order to keep her sanity. They flit in and out of her head as the train slowly rolls to its destination

This is a story that slowly reveals itself, a story of trauma in the past that has completely dictated the life that Jeanne has been able to lead. Readers of modern literature will be used to the stream of conscious technique that works very well here in solving some of the mystery of Jeanne's life. I was thoroughly convinced in what turned out to be a powerful piece of story telling with a style of its own and so 4 stars.

My favourite Holocaust fiction is probably among the more obvious:

1. The Night Trilogy by Elie Wiesel
2. If Not now, When? by Primo Levi
3. Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig

I do think that the fiction produced by those who were actually in the camps has a resonance and chill that other books don't quite attain, but that could be just me taking the part of the author.

This month's read will be :

DAYS IN THE HISTORY OF SILENCE by Merethe Lindstrom

Almost all of my Holocaust reading is nonfiction, so I will be looking for good fiction reads too. I did enjoy The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner.

I was looking on my book shelves and rediscovered two novels by Aharon Appelfeld. Both are about what happened just before the the War and one on the aftermath. I haven't read them in a while but I knew that Appelfeld was a child of eight during the war and was at a labour camp at Transnistria. He did escape and lived in forest before being picked up by the Red Army. so, look at Badenheim 1939 and The Age of Wonders.

I am currently reading We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter. It is based on the experiences of the author's family during WWII.

>7 alcottacre: I have that book. My husband was very impressed with it. I started it and bailed, thinking it was fiction, but I kept that book. I'll probably go back and read it because my husband liked it so much.

>8 SqueakyChu: Madeline, the book is fiction. It is just based on the experiences of Hunter's family during WWII. When we were in Joplin in November, Donna recommended it to me as one of the best WWII books she had ever read.

Address Unknown by Kressmann Taylor (1938)
fiction / Read in 2010
Written just before the start of World War II in an attempt to make Americans more aware of how dangerous a place Germany had become under Hitler and his Nazi Party. This short story is written as a series of brief letters between a Jewish American and his business partner who has returned to live in Munich in 1933. Taylor was inspired to write it based on the changed outlook of German friends who returned to the States after a short time living back in Germany. "I wanted to write about what the Nazis were doing and show the American public what happens to real, living people swept up in a warped ideology"
"This modern story is perfection itself. It is the most effective indictment of Nazism to appear in fiction." - The New York Times Book Review.

>10 avatiakh: - I had forgotten about this one. I read it many years ago, before LT.

An LTer read it recently so I was reminded of it.

This holiday I bought People Love Dead Jews The author Dana Horne writes excellent novels about Jewish life. This is the first non fiction Ive seen of hers. "Dara Horn examines antisemitism past and present. She concludes that while there is a lot of sentimentality surrounding certain well-known symbols of the Holocaust, and a plethora of inspirational survival stories (mostly fiction), there is not an equivalent outpouring of concern about the continuance of uniquely Jewish culture in the US and elsewhere." The reviews of this fascinated me, Im looking forward to reading it (stuck in a few challenges right now) Might be an interesting discussion book.

Speaking of : Ive noticed this a few times hereabouts, and on social media, making a Hobson choice into a 'Sophie's Choice' I shiver everytime I see that. In the same way people make some reference to the Holocaust when discussing some perceived injustice they face. Or the terms feminazis, grammer nazis. People think they are being clever I guess, I always wish I could say something about this, pointing out how much that hurts. Am I the only one who responds this way?

BTW The late husband of a cousin of mine was Gilbert Martin a biographer of Winston Churchill as well as a historian of the holocaust. He was on one of the boats to Canada as a child escaping from the war. He has many nonfiction books on the subject, that are sometimes emotionally hard to read, but provide a lot of interesting information on the subject.

>13 cindydavid4: This is her first nonfiction book. She has written nonfiction before, including some of the essays in the book, but they've always been published in as articles in periodicals like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Tablet, etc. The one I had read before the book was the Anne Frank essay, which was published in the Smithsonian Magazine online. (possibly offline, too, I don't know if that magazine has an offline version). It's still up if people want to sample her work before buying the book:

Becoming Anne Frank

There are also a bunch of other nonfiction pieces linked from her website: articles

The switch from Hobson choice to "Sophie's choice" freaks me out too, and I've never even read it. It's disturbing. And, as you and Horn both say, it's the use of the Holocaust as a tool to make other points - the use of murdered Jews as a rhetorical device. You are not the only one who responds this way. It just gets so exhausting being told not to be so sensitive all the time that a lot of us have stopped objecting publicly.

>13 cindydavid4: & >14 Julie_in_the_Library: Re: People Love Dead Jews, I haven't read the book, but seen many mentions of it here on LT lately and feel that it resonates with me very strongly. I thought of the book many times as I read some of the Facebook posts I saw on Holocaust Remembrance Day. One such was a reposting of a "feel good" story about the grandson of a Hitler Youth member "confessing" this family history to an American Jewish psychologist who happened to be working on a project in Berlin. The teller of the tale was the psychologist, who described the two hugging and thereby both being "set free" from the "prison" of their histories. I mostly held my tongue, but I did post a brief comment to the effect that as a Jew, I do not feel myself to be imprisoned by Jewish history, nor in need of being freed from it. The other comments were along the line of one person who spoke of the need for such scenes of forgiveness in order for the tragedy of the Holocaust to be "transmuted." I'm not even sure what that would mean, but I did wonder whether this obviously well-meaning person would have suggested to an African American that rage and grief over slavery is something that anyone should work on "transmuting."

I have asked people that before, would you say this about slavery? would you say this to an african american? Usually they stumble around for something to say. Hope it makes them think

>14 Julie_in_the_Library: >15 rocketjk: It reads almost as religiously Christian to me - the idea of suffering as meaningful, the focus on forgiveness as transformative and indeed necessary for both parties, the need to fit the Holocaust into a narrative with an epiphany, a moment of grace, and an uplifting ending - something that Horn actually discusses in People Love Dead Jews.

It also, probably not coincidentally, involves a Jew forgiving a Holocaust perpetrator - like The Diary of a Young Girl, it allows gentile readers to feel forgiven by proxy, so they don't have to deal with any uncomfortable thoughts about how they have benefited from and/or participated in antisemitism.

I do actually think that plenty of white Americans would act exactly like this about slavery if there were any perpetrators left to play that part. I would not be surprised to see this type of comment - or this type of fictional narrative - in discussions of and novels about white supremacist violence during the civil rights movement, for example. But I'm not nearly widely read enough in that area to know if my instincts are right on that.

>17 Julie_in_the_Library: "if there were any perpetrators left to play that part."

I understand what you mean, but again, in the story I've relayed, we're talking about the grandson of someone who was in the Hitler Youth being "forgiven" by a Jew who does not even say that he is the son or grandson of a Holocaust victim. I don't even think the grandchild of a Nazi has anything to be forgiven for. That's another factor that makes gives the story an "off key" element to me.

>18 rocketjk: I missed that detail. Oops. And I agree re the grandson not having anything to be forgiven for.

As far as children and young adults go; fiction is often a way to get them interested in the topic. That then can lead to reading of non-fiction experiences.

Has anyone read (or heard anything about) The Last Checkmate by Gabriella Saab? I was given a copy today, and I am dubious of the content, especially after reading this review.

I have Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz set aside to read in March. Has anyone read that one?

>22 alcottacre: I have. I found its approach atypical and unsettling. I'll be curious as to what you think, Stasia.

>22 alcottacre: I've also read it, about 10 years ago. I'd already seen the movie and the images from the film overtook the book as I read it.

>21 labfs39: That sounds like a good one to read for a 'how not to do it' essay.

>23 labfs39: >24 avatiakh: Thanks for the input! Kerry, I did not realize that there was a movie version of the book. I will have to see if I can find a copy after I am done with the book.

>22 alcottacre: Definitely read it. Here's my review of it from back when I read it:
https://www.librarything.com/work/333083/reviews/29729857

I read Last Train to Istanbul by Ayse Kulin and translated by John W. Baker. I have mixed feelings about this novel. It tells the story of how Turkey was able to rescue Turkish Jews from France during the Nazi occupation, and put them on trains to Istanbul. The history was very interesting as the author also related how Turkey negotiated neutrality during talks with the British and German authorities. The characters in this story were very annoying and not quite believable. I do hate when an author develops characters who are very foolish-that is what I felt about the relationships in this book.

>27 torontoc: that looks really good; didn't know the history about it. Apparently there is a documentary of the same name; would like to see that

I just finished Isaac B. Singer's novel, The Family Moskat. The novel describes Jewish life in Poland, especially in Warsaw, from the around 1905 through the Nazi invasion in 1939. While the book is not about the Holocaust per se, it is very much about the conditions inside Poland, particularly in regards to virulent anti-Semitism, that make Polish complicity in the Holocaust quite easy to understand.

I recently read a book that I posted about on my own thread, forgetting about coming here but I will copy my impressions here now. It was a difficult book for me. House on Endless Waters by Israeli writer Emuna Elon. The premise of this novel really intrigued me, initially: An Israeli writer goes to Amsterdam on a book promotion tour and while there, goes to a Jewish History museum. There, he sits with his wife and watches one of those newsreel clips often seen in such museums, from the time of WWII. Nothing unusual about that until he suddenly recognizes his much younger mother, with his older sister (who was a little child) ...and a baby that is not him. This is not a spoiler as it is from the blurb on the back of the book and in the opening pages of the book. He is obsessed with finding out who the baby is. And who HE is. So he returns to Amsterdam to try to piece together what happened and write a novel about it.

I really wanted to like this book. I don't know if the problem lay in the translation or if it was simply the writer's style but there was a lot of repetition and it grated on me. Repetition of words, of sentences, and even, on occasion, of paragraphs. Repetition, or rhetoric, can be effective, even impressive, in appropriate contexts or situations. But early on, I began to see it as a style and, for me anyhow, it was not effective or impressive, only annoying.

Another quirk that I found difficult was the dual timeline. I happen to enjoy dual timeline stories but they are usually done in alternating chapters or sometimes, different fonts, so that it is easy to follow. Not so here. Yoel, the adult author protagonist, is in present time, and obviously, the Sonia - his mother - part of the story, takes place in early 1940s Amsterdam. It started off as alternating chapters, then alternating paragraphs, with paragraph breaks. Sometimes, it switched to even within the same paragraph and I found myself going back more than a few times to figure out what was going on. Maybe I am just really slow to catch on but it wasn't until well past the halfway point that it dawned on me that the 1940s sections were the story he was writing.

Also, as if all this weren't enough, the author of this book, Emuna Elon, would insert random paragraphs at random sections of the book, that told a mini backstory of someone, or something that had no connection at all to this story. I am not sure why. Maybe she felt that it fleshed out the book. But honestly, there was never any reference to any of these little inserts, before or after, and, to my mind, they added absolutely nothing to an already disjointed story.

Normally, I would have long since abandoned a book that irritated me so much. But even though I guessed quite early on, what the ending would be (and it turned out I was right), I somehow felt compelled to trudge through it to the end. In fairness, I did enjoy the physical descriptions of Amsterdam, and learned more than I had previously known about prewar Dutch Jewry and I always love learning something new from books.

In any case, that is it and while the premise was a good one, I am not inclined to try any other titles by this author. It was only after writing this that I decided to look at other reviews on LT. So many people loved this book, and gave it high marks, though one or two others did mention the issues that bothered me, about the writing and the timelines. Oh well, I do find it interesting that so many people can have such a diversity of opinions and impressions about the same story. The human condition, I suppose!

>30 jessibud2: thats too bad, because the premise is amazing. I have trouble with dual time stories, esp if the event happened years ago and the othre story links someone from the present. Usually the event itself was enough to drive the book; present time superfulous story to connect with modern readers usually doesn't work. Sorry this didn't have a better writer; I am very curious what happens at the end. can you put it in spoiler mode? If youd rather notk thats fine; After all you did all the work for a book you didn't like!
1

>31 cindydavid4: - Here ya go: The story revolves around 2 families in the early 1940s, Sonia, her doctor husband and their young daughter and toddler son, and their neighbours, a couple with one baby son. As sometimes happened at that time, the Jewish families were encouraged to give over their children to *safe houses* or non-Jewish families who would care for them until the end of the war. All this was done through an underground network and was described well in the story. Bottom line, Sonia went along with it, managed to get her daughter back but not her son. At the last possible moment, in a heart-wrenching scene at the train station, the neighbour pushes his baby son into her arms as they are taken away. Sonia, her daughter and the neighbour son eventually make it to Israel and she raises him as her own, making the 2 children promise her to never return to Amsterdam. When Yoel finally does go on his book promotion tour, he is an adult with children and grandchildren of his own and his mother is dead. That is part of the tension of the story, of course. Anyhow, I did guess correctly but still felt that I wanted to see how it unfolded.

thanks for that. wow what an ending. does he find the his sister? Too bad the rest of the book isn't good. (At times when I am uncertain I want to finish a book, Ill go to the back and actually see how it ends. sometimes it makes me read it, othre times no)

>33 cindydavid4: - Actually, his sister was with him all along and lived in Israel, as he did. The mother emigrated to Israel with both kids (their father was taken away and never heard from again, presumed dead in a concentration camp) and he grew up always believing his older sister was really his sister. After the whole episode in Amsterdam when he discovered the film in the museum, he called her to try to find out what she knew, what she remembered, if she could fill in some of the blanks. She was only around 6 or so at the time so wouldn't have understood or known much of the background details but she did confirm some things. The author left that part rather obscure and what we, as readers, *discover*, I think turns out to be what he imagines in the novel he is writing..

Funny you say that because I also sometimes peek at the ending to see if I want to read the whole book, yet in this one, I did not. I think the journey to the ending was the more compelling issue for me and I wish the writing had been better. Again, maybe it was just the translation. My Hebrew is not good enough to have read it in the original so I guess I'll never know!

I've just finished The List by journalist, Martin Fletcher which is not quite a Holocaust novel as it deals with the aftermath of the war.
Fletcher has based this fiction around his own family story and real life events. It's 1945 and as a trickle of survivors begins to arrive in London the Jewish refugees living in Hampstead Heath, London are learning of the terrible fate of their family members. There is a local petition circulating to send the Jewish refugees back to where they came from.
It also covers the Irgun and Lehi plot to assassinate Foreign Minister Bevin on British soil and the letterbomb campaign against British servicemen who serve in Palestine.
In the midst of all this Austrian Jewish refugees, Edith and George are expecting their first child and Edith's cousin, Anna, arrives from the death camps.
On clearing through his father's papers in 2002, Fletcher came across an old piece of paper with two lists of names, one his father's family, the other his mother's - every name had been crossed through as their fate was discovered. He determined then to write a book titled The List.

Will these threads in the Holocaust Literature group be continued in 2023? I know they haven't been frequently visited but I have enjoyed all the contributions so far and would appreciate if they continued on.

Yes, we'll be here. I only read five Holocaust books this year; hopefully next year I will get to more.

Good to know. Do you need to start new threads for the new year or can these just continue on? I have no idea how that actually works.

I'm keeping my same thread and continue to add to it. Usually only the big groups like 75 Books and Club Read do yearly threads. The groups that focus on a topic rather than a yearly challenge tend to be static.

Edited to fix word.

Thanks, Lisa. Makes sense.

Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard Leopoldstadt is the name of an area in Vienna where poor Jewish people lived. This play takes place in Vienna at the home of a wealthy Jewish family and spans the years from 1899 to 1955. A number of the family members have married non-Jews. The grandmother seems to be the only member of this family who wants to keep Jewish religious customs. There are discussions about feeling more Austrian than Jewish while still confronting barriers to social life because of discrimination. The scene that takes place in the early 1920's shows the problems with changes in the political system after the loss in world War One. Family members have been affected and there is conflict as some of the sons and daughters have different alliances in politics and religion. And the scene after the take over of Austria by Germany is fairly brutal as those in the family who stayed in Vienna suffer. This play shows a very large family with many cousins. The last scene should remind the audience and reader about the consequences of complacency to the political world. ( Tom Stoppard has his own interesting background. I believe that he found out very late in life that he was Jewish- he was born in the Czech Republic and his family did flee from the Nazis. )

I moved my review to the right thread-memoirs.

One of the greatest holocaust novels is Chava Rosenfarb's The Tree of Life: A Trilogy of Life in the Lodz Ghetto. Covers 1939-1944. It was written in Yiddish, but has been translated into English by the author and her daughter.
It is fiction, but considerable fact is worked in.

For example, the German-appointed head of the Jewish Council for the ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, is in the novel. Elements of his known life and role appear. Those familiar with this name will know that he does not come off well. (But lest I mislead, the book is not his story, but the story of the entire ghetto.)

Rosenfarb was in the ghetto herself (about 15 when the war broke out). The novel is panoramic in its depiction of the ghetto, and the many different kinds of people. I view her as the Yiddish Tolstoy, because of the breadth and depth of the characters in this 900 page work. I have been deeply moved by her intense humanity.

So far in 2023 I have read these -

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel
The Paris Library by Janet Charles
The Librarian Spy by Susan Martin

All good; all based on real events and people.

>43 pechmerle: Wow! I had never heard of that book. Thanks for posting about it here.

I finished The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant (1961). A powerful novel about a camp survivor who has shut down all his emotions as a path forward from the trauma of losing his wife and children in the camps in the most tragic of circumstances.

Saw a NYT review of a new translation of a book by anne berestla carte postale "The post card" about an adult child of survivors who is told at a passover seder, "you are Jewish only when it suited you" that leads to a search for names on a postcard that her mother kept from her. Looks really interesting (review on here as well)

>47 cindydavid4: - I saw that one at my local bookstore and was very intrigued, as well. It was still in hard cover, though, so I have to see if my library has it.

>47 cindydavid4: Yes, I read a review of that one, too and it looks fascinating.

I finished The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The opening setting is the remote rural mountains of southern Poland in the late 17th Century in the years immediately following the Chmielnicki (often spelled Khmelnytsky) Uprising, an invasion by Cossack forces in rebellion against Polish domination. In Jewish history, these events are known as the Chmielnicki Massacres, as the Cossack forces, aided often by the Poles themselves, perpetrated widespread and massive pogroms. Whole villages were essentially obliterated. Our protagonist, Jacob, is a survivor of one such attack on his native village, Josefov. His wife and three children, he believes, have been murdered, but instead of being killed himself, Jacob is captured and sold into slavery to Jan Bzik, a farmer in remote mountain town. Escape into the mountains, whose ways are unknown to him, means certain death, and the villages have sworn to kill Jacob on sight if he is spotted on the wrong side of the river that borders Bzik's land.

For five years Jacob spends his winters in a high mountain cabin tending to Bzik's cattle. His only source of food and water is what is brought up the mountain to him daily by Bzik's daughter, Wanda. Far from Jewish community and the holy books he loves, Jacob strives to maintain a pious Jewish life as best he can, and that include resisting the strong physical attraction that Jacob and Wanda feel for each other. Jacob would surely be excommunicated by the rabbis for cohabitating with a Gentile, and either or both of the two could be burned alive by the Church. Marriage is out of the question. Well, but as we know, such temptation cannot be resisted forever, and certainly not in fiction. And so our tale is launched. The Slave was first published in 1962 and allegorical references to the Holocaust are impossible to ignore. Highly recommended.

>50 rocketjk: Interesting. I was unaware of that novel by Singer. Which is your favorite so far? I have only read his stories for children and Love and Exile.

>51 labfs39: So far (four novels in) my favorite is The Family Moskat, with The Slave a semi-close second.

>52 rocketjk: I also enjoyed The Family Moskat. I've also read The Slave and looking back at my notes from 2011 I rated it very highly.

I've just finished House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon and thought it was quietly outstanding. It's about an Israeli writer discovering a secret from the past and alternates between present day Amsterdam where he has gone to write his next novel and Amsterdam during WW2 where we slowly find out about what happened to the people in his life.
We get how Ann Frank has been reduced to a tourist attraction in the present day and then feel the heartbreak of Jewish parents sending their children into hiding, not knowing if they'll ever be reunited with them.

>53 avatiakh: - Interesting that we had such different responses to this book. I reviewed it at length up in >30 jessibud2:.

>54 jessibud2: Funny. A lot of the reasons you give for not liking the book are why I liked it. I was just in the mood for this one I suppose and even though the secret is obvious it still works. I loved the descriptions of Amsterdam, the present and past at random.
I've got her If you awaken love on my kindle app and looking forward to it.

I've just finished The Postcard by Anne Berest which is considered to be autofiction. It's an interesting read and I appreciated the section dealing with the return of camp survivors to Paris.

Just wanted to leave this here. Over in the 75ers group, we have an American Authors Challenge, with different authors for each month. November is Jewish Authors month, in case anyone is interested in jumping in: https://www.librarything.com/topic/364977

I recently finished Enemies, a Love Story by Isaac B. Singer. It deals with the Holocaust through the eyes (and fear and relief and guilt) of Jewish Holocaust survivors who have finally made their way to America, and in particular New York City. I recommend it highly. You can find my full-length review on my Club Read thread.

Now reading
Then by M Gleitzman, sequel to Once.
Continues the story of a young boy on his own trying to survive in WWll Poland.

I finished reading Adama by Lavie Tidhar which isn't the usual Holocaust fiction and features survivors living on a kibbutz near Haifa as well as their descendants.

My Mother's Secret by J. L. Witterick. This is billed as fiction based on real people and events. One Polish woman and her daughter hid a number of Jews in their house (attic, cellar, barn loft) during WWII, at great risk to themselves. People caught hiding Jews would be shot if discovered. Such non-Jews, who just did the right thing, were, after the war, recognized as *The Righteous among the Nations*. None of the people who she hid knew about each other and the story is told from 4 perspectives. It is a short book, a compelling read. Here are some quotes that particularly spoke to me:

"...It's hard to say how we become the people we do. My mother believes that it comes from our choices. She says, "If you choose to do the right thing, it's a conscious decision at first. Then it becomes second nature. You don't have to think about what is right because doing the right thing becomes who you are, like a reflex. Your actions with time become your character."

...I realized then that Poland didn't have the support of the friends that we thought. How could the world have been so misled?

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable" - Sydney J. Harris

Epilogue:

This book is fictional, but it was inspired by the true story of Franciszka Halamajowa, who with her daughter Helena saved the lives of 15 Jews in Poland during the Second World War. She also hid a young German soldier in her attic at the same time. Her son died while transporting a wagon full of supplies to partisan Jews hiding in the forest.

Before the war, there were 6000 Jews in Sokol, Poland. Only thirty survived and half of those because of one Polish woman, Franciszka.

I believe that all of us, like Franciszka, have within us the potential to be great. Sometimes we coast through life without this potential surfacing because life has been easy on us.

When we have much to lose, but still choose to do the right thing, we uncover the nobility that is within all of us. To endure what is unbearable and to do it with grace, that is how we know that we have arrived.

I read
Milkweed by J Spinelli,
award-winning novel about a child surviving in WWII Poland.

I read The Painted Bird, a brutal novel about a six-year-old boy trying to survive alone in Poland during WWII.