I read Sara Zyskind's Stolen Years the year I turned eleven, and it served both as my introduction to the subject of human evil, and as a launching point for a prolonged period of obsessive interest in the Holocaust, during which I read many, many testimonies. I know of others who have had a similar experience, and I sometimes think that such intensive adolescent reading projects (seen also in the ubiquitous novels and memoirs of children afflicted with terminal illnesses, a genre quite popular with young readers) are a means of exploring subjects both terrifying and mysterious. That first glimpse of such a horrific reality prompts a desire to know more, to comprehend. But, in my own experience, the more I discovered, the less I truly did understand...

As for the actual book itself, Stolen Years is an incredibly powerful work, a visceral portrait of a young Jewish girl, Sara Plager, who is caught up in the events of World War II. A survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death-camp, Sara relates her heart-breaking experiences, from being forced to witness her father's gradual death from hunger, to the horrific reality of being a slave laborer at Auschwitz, and later Mittelstein. A highly, highly recommended book - one that should never have gone out of print... ( )