5 comments about Good-bye to the Mermaids: A Childhood Lost in Hitler's Berlin.

1. Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections
   
   Pushing Up the Sky
   
   
   
   I was buying some books on Amazon.com with an article I had to write at the back of my mind, and a parent Guide I was editing for EMK Press (www.emkpress.com) by Terra Trevor (author of Pushing Up the Sky) at the forefront. I was ordering on automatic pilot, while thinking about the articles I was editing... suddenly my choice of books had an Amazon.com suggestion staring up at me.
   
   It was of course Karin Finell's searing, sensitive book Good-bye to the Mermaids. It documents `a childhood lost in Hitler's Berlin'. My brain clicked into gear as I read the brief blurb. Serendipity! I was writing an article for adoptive parents of kids adopted internationally. The remit? How we adoptive parents help our adopted kids feel pride in birth cultures prejudiced by e.g. civil war, lack of human rights, family planning practices that seem draconian, societies where the ethos of `family' is lost to poverty and the baggage of substance abuse which that brings.
   
   I bought Good-bye to the Mermaids, and devoured it in three late night sittings. And I realised as I read that this book is a must read for anyone who has survived... or helped another survive.. the onslaught of horror and terror which was imposed not sought, where the survivor has been helped to find another safe haven, an anchorage in which to grow.
   
   But the book shows that no-one who survives can leave behind the memories. Even if they move to another country where things are meant to be better...
   
   What a message for adopted children and their parents! EMK Press (where I am Senior Editor) publishes books and offers free Parent Guides for adoptive kids and their families. Adoption Parenting: Creating a Toolbox, Building Connections, our publication for adoptive parents, has a wonderful section JOURNEY which deals with where adoptees travel as adults in making sense of adoption. To add to this chapter in our groundbreaking book, I would recommend that adoptive parents and folk now adult who were adopted internationally read Karin Finell's book on how to survive knowing you were part but NOT part of a culture that made family life impossible.



2. After reading this remarkable book I concluded it was not only informative as to historical content but also a masterpiece of writing. It is an important addition to a series of books by a variety of people, who lived through the horrors at the end of WWII in Berlin - I have read most of them, including the one by Anonymous. Their stories reflect all of the terror and awful conditions of those months and years as does Karin Finell's book. The framework Finell uses, the very detailed personal memories enriched by her reconstruction of actual verbal exchanges is unique, as is the perspective of a child growing up and experiencing the change from a privileged early childhood to the frightening reality of what followed - and then the slow and gradual recovery. And also, the special relationship with her Oma, which I thought is a centerpiece of Finell's book. Apart from the very human side, the American raised Oma also brought the U.S. close to Karin Finell as a child and prepared her for her immigration. The book is a tribute to the women who had to cope and did cope so valiantly with the conditions thrust upon them by a war which many supported, and a few loathed from the beginning, as they loathed and continued loathing the Nazi government. Finell's book also made me aware again how little we citizen can do when politicians go amok as did Hitler and all of the Nazis.



3. If you read all these reviews of Karin's book, you will still have many surprises as you read Goodbye to the Mermaids. The strength of Karin's narration is that she recounts the precise moments when her attitudes toward war change--and those moments shock because war mutilates reality. None of the events in this book conform to normalcy. To buy bread, for example, meant dodging bullets and bombs in occupied Berlin. Putting on a dress meant risking your life.
   
   Karin recounts the contrasts between her family's needs and desires with the realities of war, and she does this in a subtle, detailed way. Karin wasn't just a child in the war, she was a maturing young woman whose sensibilities grow within the context of her story. She makes her reader feel the deprivation and humiliation of war. This book is one of the best I've read in a long time. It's an extraordinary work by a woman who sacrificed much of her life to war and the repercussions of it. She deserves our respect, and I feel honored to know her.



4. A heart-wrenching story lovingly told by Karin Finell. She relates what was for her a normal part of growing up while participating in activities of the Hitler youth, watching friends disappear, and daring to question.
   
   
   
   Good-bye to the Mermaids is beautifully written, with gorgeously remembered details, providing a deep, rich look into life in wartime Germany that we have not seen before.



5. "Karin Finell's memoir affected me tremendously. It widened and deepened my understanding of a young child's character growing up under extraordinary (and many times extraordinarily difficult) circumstances. Finell, in her narrative, recreated so vividly the world of her youth, the places she lived in and the people she lived with, as well as her own thoughts, feelings, insights, and observations. It was as if I could hear the voice of the child Karin telling each story. Using the device of a series of "stories," by the way, seems exactly the right way to develop such ar narrative.
   This is a first-rate book, beautifully written and beautifully produced by the Missouri Press. Anyone interested in the WW 2 period will be the richer for having read it, as am I. "

2 comments about A Good Man in Evil Times: The Heroic Story of Aristides de Sousa Mendes -- The Man Who Saved the Lives of Countless Refugess in World War II.

1. As the previous reviewer from Portugal noted, humanity sometimes fails to acknowledge people who do the right thing. Sousa Mendes was just such a man. He was a Portuguese Council in southern France at the time of the German invasion. Jews from the low countries and France fled south trying to get to the neutral countries of Spain and Portugal. These countries sealed their borders in most cases, so one had to have a visa to get across the border. Sousa Mendes violated his country's rule aginst these stateless persons, and literally issued thousands of visas so that these Jews and other opponents of the Nazis could escape. In the process, he destroyed his career and eventually died in poverty. He did do the proper thing where most others abided their country's rules.
   This was an inspirational read. Fralon details the life of Sousa Mendes and Portugal's role in both World Wars. He also details a little of the fascist rule of Salzaar. Unfortunately there were no happy endings with Sousa Mendes. The Portuguese government even balked at honoring him, and was forced by outside pressure to recognize what he did in the nineties.



2. It is regratable that great men are rarely aknowledge as so in life. Aristides de Sousa Mendes was no exception, but his acts were expeptional. This book was long due. It's finally here, it's very well written, a just tribute to a men of honour, and I thank the author for it.

No comments about Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (Routledge Twentieth Century European History).

5 comments about Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years.

1. A diary can be as interesting as the person who writes it is and Mihail Sebastian is a complex character. I liked the way he documents his love exploits, the illusions and the hopes he has, his love of music as the ultimate refuge, the detailed account of writing his best novel, "The accident", and his plays, the total sincerity and subjectivity. There are so many nuances in the friendships he keeps - like the one with Mircea Eliade, Iron Guard legionaire and his friend for more than 15 years, like Camil Petrescu, colourful and overconfident writer, and many more.
   When reading the diary, you come to know the frivolous Romanian interbellic "elites", the painful exploits of literary creation, friendships streched by political divide, the uncertainty of the war, the humiliation of the Jews during fascism. Besides, Sebastian's writing style is beautiful and easy to follow.
   This book is mostly perceived as an account of the Holochaust in Romania. However, it has much more to offer. Not only the grim and the militant view of the events, but the full caleidoscope of Sebastian's personna.



2. First of all, the "Journal" is exquisitly written.
   Then, this is The Book for understanding multiple facets of life in war-time Romania, shining light on previously hidden places.

   A note of strong dissagreement with a previuos reviewer's assesment of reasons for which the book is supposedly absent from Romanian bookstores:

   This book is not "out of print" in its original version, it has been printed multiple times (last time in 2002) and is available as we speak. It is being bought off the shelves like fresh bread every time Humanitas re-prints it.
   Thousands and thousands of Romanians bought, read, discussed, reviewed and raved about the Journal. We were changed by it, as any other feeling human would! Countless echoes in the press, radio and TV shows were generated by this publication.

   Sebastian's Journal became a cornerstone of our perception of Romania's past, not just for a handful of passionate readers but for a whole nation.
   Noam, research before you write.




3. This is a unique document from any perspective you approach it. I found it particularly revealing about my father's background; Bucharest's middle class before WWII. The author came from a Jewish community who regarded itself as an assimilated part of a basically friendly Rumania. The amicable feelings towards Rumania have always run deep in its Jewish expatriates. Those who immigrated to Israel recreated a piece of pre-war Bucharest in Tel-Aviv. The book's description of a specific social set fascinates, with its elegant frivolity and gregarious bonhomie that was stifled under Ceausescu, but survived in my parent's social circle and in that of the Rumanian Jewish community.

   Sebastian parades a delightful set of characters. From the comical Prince Antoine Bibescu, who walks to theatre among the barbarians "en pantoufles," to the playwright Eugène Ionesco, Sebastian's pen never fails to capture the essence his friends' personalities. Ionesco is mentioned only in passing but his predicament is sobering, if not unique. He was not able to keep his job because of his mother's Jewish background. Ionesco, who never identified himself as Jewish, had not experienced life as a minority and had difficulties dealing with his new status. Apparently he had an emotional breakdown before he finally succeeded in returning to France. I do not think that Ionesco or his biographers ever expounded on that chapter of his life from this perspective. What he had experienced in Rumania at the time may explain the inspiration for his play, Rhinocéros (1958).

   This amusing social tapestry is but a background and introduction to the real drama of this diary. The author portrays the gradual evolution of a very sinister external reality, and more significantly, his own reactions to it. It illustrates a difficult and conflictual internal process of disillusionment, of realigning one's internal alliances, or, perhaps, the creeping realization that your friends are turning into rhinoceroses. As the author discovers during the peak of the persecutions, this is a process many assimilated Jews went through in past centuries under similar circumstances.

   Sebastian refers to his homeland as "a Balkan swamp," where people change political affiliations like they change their shirts (something at which Ionesco's father was particularly good). He makes some lucid observations about Rumanian Jews' easy optimism and, contrary to common belief, the Jews' short memory of past tragedies. This selective amnesia of prior calamities is an attitude prevalent among Rumanian Jews in Israel, who nurture a sympathetic viewpoint about the events described in this book.

   Indeed, this book confronts basic notions many people hold about that era of Rumanian history; making it highly controversial. My parents are a perfect illustration of the strong but contradictory feelings it arouses. My mother, deported from Cernauti (Chernovitz) in Bucovina to a concentration camp with the rest of her family, had no problems accepting Sebastian's account. My father, on the other hand, who hails from Bucharest, responded with disbelief to my reports about my revelations from the text. He remembered many of the events reported, for example the confiscation of the radios and the forced labor, but he refused to put it in any special context. His recollection was suffused with what seemed to me like heavy denial of the meaning and purpose of the regime's behavior. He combined this with a peculiar version of the history of those times, and a disturbing set of rationalizations of events ("it was only the Iron Guard," or, "everybody I knew survived"). He agreed to read the book, but after he received it, changed his mind and refused. Needless to say, my family, like many others, has never reached an agreement about the basic facts of the period. Another way of understanding the kind of condoning spirit displayed by my father is that it is representative of ethnic minorities' traditionally docile attitude towards authority. This deference, accentuated by fear, may also explain how millions of Jews were gullible enough to allow the Nazis to gas them. The Israelis' intransigence represents a backlash against generations of this servile obeisance, not unlike the kind of militant political transformation experienced by American blacks in the 20th century.




4. The fabricated myth, by the Roumanian Nationalists, that Roumania was a "good" place to be for a Jew, during the Holocaust is to be completely and forever forgotten. From the accounts of Mihail Sebastian, it is obvious that the Roumanian intelligentia, the literary circles were filled with Legionairs that spreed antisemitism in a most vicious manner. The German SS Killing Detachments were, according to Eichman's testimony during his trial, abhorred and disgusted by the crude cruelty of the Roumanian troups during the deportation of the Jewish population from Bassarabia to camps in Transnistria. The Roumanian Nation as a whole, is guilty of the extermination of is Jewish population, collectively the Nation should repent just like the Germans. This of course requires self-examination, admission and a certain degree of intelligence. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the true socio-political climat in Roumania during WW2.



5. Mikhail Sebastian was the Romanian Walter Benjamin. Trained as a lawyer and a literary critic, Sebastian published a highly-regarded novel at the age of 23. He held one of those literary-functionary jobs requiring very little actual work or presence at the office which Europe once awarded to its philosophers and artists. Like Benjamin, Sebastian was a skittish, highly personable writer: a professional skeptic, an independent thinker, who could amuse himself indefinitely with his own thoughts and company.

   To see the War through Sebastian's eyes in this diary is to finally understand it. The journal - together with Radu Ioanid's recently published history of the Romanian holocaust - certainly explodes the myth that Romania was a "good" place to be Jewish during WW2. In fact, the Antonescu's wartime government - reactive always to the country's popular ultra-fascist Iron Guard - annhilated half the country's Jews, some 150,000 people. The "cut" was purely geographic: Bessarabia and Bukovina, two cities bordering Odessa with large Jewish populations, were targeted for ethnic cleansing; whereas the Jews of Bucharest were merely subject to statutes barring their employment, use of amenities, etc. But what's most extraordinary about the Journals is the way that it gives this kind of victimage-by-chance a human face: curious and halting.

   Over the course of two years, Sebastian is exiled from the inner circles of the Bucharest literati. His close friends and mentors, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, have become intelletual leaders of the Iron Guard. Sebastian waits in Bucharest, increasingly unemployable due to anti-Semitic statutes and restrictions, borrowing money to pay the rent while fully aware of the massacres and pogroms that were taking place in the northern regions of his country.

   The apartments of Bucharest Jews were confiscated; and then their telephones; and then eventually their skis?! Each week brought new onslaughts of mad and crippling restrictions. Sebastian notes tbe "mute despair that has become a kind of Jewish greeting." He witnesses this, with no illusions, while trying to piece together a subsistence living for himself and his parents, at times writing plays which would be produced under the names of non-Jewish friends, which he was eventually best known for.

   Sebastian never married; he had a number of simultaneous & consecutive affairs with married and independent women, as was the custom at that time and place. He had no children. He has a great sense of vocation as a writer and a thinker, and this Journal comes closer than any document I've read to conveying a sense of the "dazed stupor ... with no room for gestures, feeling, words" that comes from living alongside horror.

2 comments about The Bronski House.

1. Philip Marsden's book is a small masterpiece. It is poetic and evocative. He has a sharp sense of details. No wonder he has now written his first novel after a couple of travel books.
   Trough his friendship with Zofia Illinski and access to her mother's letters, diaries etc he portrays a lost world, the upper classes in Poland and Belarus between the wars, and how their world is completely shattered by it.
   The various personalities in the book are fascinating among them Zofia's mother who is an exceptional woman, strong, talented, beautiful and with a spirit that saves the family from extinction.
   Marsden's journey together with Zofia to her childhood is very moving.
   All in all this is a very good read. You don't have to be interested in Poland or in history and the likes. This book will interest and move you.



2. The language is so poetic and fluent, it hurls you away, lightly and fluffily to a different era; a world long gone and forgotten. It has something of an East European Gone With The Wind theme, only much more concise and fleetingly. I longed for more pages, a hundred more, fivehundred more, in this novel too timid and subdued somehow. Perfect script for a fullblown-no-expenses -spared Hollywood film!

5 comments about A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

1. I was so much looking forward to reading this book to learn the details of the author of Fragments, but ultimately this book left me with more questions than I had before I read it, not to mention bringing up more issues and then leaving them unresolved. For example, was Binjamin tattooed with a number on his arm? We are told that Varena is not Binjamin/Bruno's wife, but then are never told who she is or what connection she has to him. Was any DNA evidence ever made public, or is Binjamin/Bruno's true identity an ongoing mystery? I am reading the article in Granta #66 by Elena Lappin, and in the first few pages have learned that Binjamin/Bruno was married prior to his relationship with Varena and has three children! What a shocker. Why was this not mentioned in Eskin's book? Where are the children now and what do they think about the whole Wilkomirski affair? In any case, this book is passable as an introduction to the case, but I do agree with another reviewer here who stated that Eskin's personal history, other than being the catalyst to his investigation of the Wilkomirski affair, is really not very interesting (and this from a lover of memoirs and family history).



2. In a word, too much "me", too little on the affair Wilkomirski. As the author recounts, Wilkomirski repeatedly refused to be interviewed, and despite valiant, pushy attempts, Eskin never succeeds in cornering his quarry. But descriptions of these nonencounters do not make for compelling reading. Nor do long ramblings about the extended Wilkomirski family. With little to write about, Eskin falls back on writing about himself, and neither he nor his relatives have a story to tell that merits book length treatment. This is essentially a family memoir piggybacked over the Wilkomirski affair. Eskin plays up his tangential connection to the curious Fragments episode, but the family connection is based on hope, not reality, and the writing, amorphous and rambling, reflects the lack of content.

   Most important, I miss entirely a moral viewpoint. The crux of the issue is evaded: is there an objective truth, or is being a Holocaust survivor an entirely subjective matter of "feeling" like a survivor? The payoff at the end - the discovery of a tangible connection to distant relatives in Israel - is awfully thin stuff for the overlong buildup that preceded it.




3. I enjoyed "A Life in Pieces" very much! Far from the narrative being jumbled, I found Eskin's weaving together of his personal search for his family's roots, along with the related story of the Wilkomirski hoax, very skillful. The story is told on 2 levels. It was the fraudulent claims of Bruno Grosjean/Doessekker, AKA Binjamin Wilkomirski, which ironically awakened interest in the author's ancestors, since his mother's family name was originally Wilkomirski. After a family reunion to meet the bogus 'relative', the author details his attempts to learn of his family from elderly relatives. This leads ultimately to a visit to Riga, Latvia, where the family's forebears came from. He then moves on to Israel, where long lost relatives, descendents of that remnant of the family that remained in Europe, are located. Eskin's own experience as a 3rd. generation Jewish American mirrors those of many, like myself, whose families had relatives who escaped from or who became victims of the Nazis. This book was written as part memoir. Therefore, his use of 'I', 'me' and 'myself' is wholly appropriate. It is a fascinating story which raises all sorts of troubling philosophical issues. These issues include the plight of former child survivors, false memories, victimhood, and family. Unfortunately, these issues more than ever before, took form with 'Wilkomirski' and his claims. I very strongly recommend this thought provoking work.



4. When I read Fragments I could not understand how anyone could have believed Binjamin Wilkomirski's story. It was incredible that a child as small as he claimed to have been could have survived a Nazi death camp (much less two) or recalled the things he claimed to remember. By the time I read it, the book had been exposed as fiction. But the tale seemed to me so weak that I doubted I would have found it any more convincing had I read it in 1996, before the scandal broke.

   As a longtime student of the Holocaust, I was therefore fascinated by Wilkomirski's exposure as Bruno Doessekker, the Swiss birth-child of Yvonne Berthe Grosjean, who surrendered her son for adoption in 1945; he was ultimately adopted by the Doessekkers.

   Stefen Maechler's Wilkomirski Affair (2001) provided a superb and thorough expose of the fraud Bruno Grosjean Doessekker perpetrated. Maechler pursued every possible lead, compared each minute detail in Doessekker's narration of "events" with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer and accounts of other child survivors. He interviewed members of the Doessekker and Grosjean families and more. The most damning evidence Maechler unearthed was that in 1981, Doessekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." He received a third of her estate.

   Wilkomirski/Doessekker had also used Laura Grabowski, who claimed to have known him in a children's home in Krakow, to "corroborate" his story. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Sideshow: The Real Story of Lauren Stratford. Lauren Stratford's Social Security number is the same as that of Grabowski, who used it to make a false survivor's claim. Maechler even found similarities between Satan's Sideshow and Fragments. But Maechler did not answer the question of how Wilkomirski/Doessekker drew people in.

   Blake Eskin masterfully picks up that loose strand from a personal perspective: His maternal great-grandmother Anna Wilbur had immigrated in 1929 to New York from Riga--the Latvian city Wilkomirski/Doesseker said he was from. Her family had changed their surname name from Wilkomirski to Wilbur on their arrival in New York. Moreover, Anna Wilbur's brother and sister-in-law had in 1926 lived at 80 Moskva Street, the same address Wilkomirski/Doessekker claimed as his. Thus was Eskin's family taken in.

   They understandably longed for news of distant relations left behind in Riga, years before the Holocaust. They knew existentially what the Holocaust had done. They had not yet personalized the loss, however. In that context, it is not surprising that Eskin's mother, Eden Force Eskin, and her first cousin once removed, Miriam Vim, wanted to believe that Wilkomirski/Doesseker was Anna Wilbur's long lost nephew.

   Eskin takes readers on his two-fold journey, as he discovers both Doessekker/Wilkomirski's fraud and his family's roots in Riga and Israel. He covers some of the same ground as Maechler, but he adds a human dimension of which Maechler's sturdy reportorial account is devoid.

   This book opens new intellectual and emotional understanding to losses suffered by the world's Jewish community during the Holocaust. Even now, families that once believed they had completely escaped that terrible trauma are discovering whom and what they lost--family, culture, language, and an entire world. Though but one example of that discovery, Eskin's investigations prove somewhat archetypal.

   The Nazi Holocaust extinguished the lives of roughly a third of the Jewish people. Some families, like Eskin's, remained for years oblivious to their personal losses. But Eskin shows that very few were untouched. In that context, it's easy to see why families still hope to find their members among the living. And that context is the only thing that can lay the Wilkomirski/Doessekker fraud to its final and necessary rest. Alyssa A. Lappen




5. I am very interested in the Fragments affair and was eager to read this new account of it. Unfortunately I found this book disappointing. It adds little new to the other published works, notably historian Stefan Maechler's excellent account which was published in English last year. While Eskin has a good style, his narrative is jumbled, he skips around a lot and it is often hard to work out what is going on. Also Eskin virtually ruins his own book by going on endlessly about himself when it is really not relevant to Wilkomirski's story. There are too many unnecessary uses of the words I, me, and myself by Eskin to make this a focussed study of the Fragments affair.

2 comments about This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz.

1. Every story that is told about someone who witnessed the war during the years of WW2 is incredible. Its sometimes hard to read about these events over and over, but the enormity of it all is almost beyond belief. This is a fast read and the foreword and afterword are important additions to the story as written.



2. This account of an Italian family's brutal experience at the hands of the Nazis is riveting. Ms. Sonnino writes in a spare, unflinching style. What isn't spared is the horror that she and her beloved family endured. From safe house to safe house, to their discovery, to their horrific journey to the the death camps in Poland, to their hearbreaking seperation, to the inhuman treatment they suffered with such dignity, it is a tale I will never forget. This book will take its place as required reading for anyone who wants to understand the depths to which humans can fall, and the effort that one woman made to rise above it somehow.

1 comments about Child of a Turbulent Century (Jewish Lives).

1. This is an absolutely fascinating book. Erlich is an engaging and talented writer. This well written and lively memoir covers a broad terrain including pre-WWII Jewish life in Poland Russia, the rise of the Bund (Jewish labor movement), Erlich's emergence as a leading academic in the field of Russian literature, American academic life in the 1950s and beyond, and much more. Highly recommended.

1 comments about Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book).

1. I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

   Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
   grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
   Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

   This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
   from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
   For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
   Buchenwald).

   Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

5 comments about A Jump for Life: A Survivor's Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland.

1. 
   Originally written in 1946, Cyprys' account is remarkably free of the Judeocentric, German-whitewashing, anti-Christian, and anti-Polish tendencies of today. She devotes almost as much attention to German crimes against Poles as to those against Jews. Furthermore, Cyprys makes it clear that the Germans regarded the Poles as having no more inherent right to live than the Jews. Consider what happened when two Poles were mistakenly herded with Jews into a Treblinka-bound train: "Two gentiles in our wagon tried to explain to the Germans that they did not fit into this society and tried to show their documents. All to no avail. `Even if you are not a Jew, you are a damned Pole', yelled the German, and slapped the older woman's face, barking `Polish swine' and with his rifle butt drove her to the wagon." (p. 95).
   
   Cyprys reported a balanced range of Polish attitudes towards Jews (pp. 118-119, 127, 132), some of which varied within the same family (pp. 142-143). Ironically, she was helped by the obsessively anti-Semitic Mrs. Zosia, who felt sorry for the Jews and who aided them (pp. 220-221).
   
   In his FEAR, Jan Tomasz Gross presents a distorted view of Poles acquiring Jewish properties during the German occupation. In contrast, when mentioning how some Poles pretended to be Volksdeutsche in order to join in the German-sponsored pillage of Jewish properties, she nevertheless added: "The local mob usually guided the Germans to the rich Jewish houses and stores. With the deepest shame I must admit that there were some Jews among the scum." (pp. 25-26).
   
   One inflammatory Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about Jews, while being transported to the death camps and with full knowledge of their impending deaths, being forced to endure the sight of indifferent or gleeful Polish onlookers. Against such nonsense, we learn that the death trains had small, barred windows well above eye level, and with nothing to stand on in order to look out of them (p. 96). Viewing (in either direction) was nearly impossible. The author and her daughter were loaded on a Treblinka-bound train. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Cyprys was boosted up and enabled to cut through the bars to jump out and to have her daughter Eva (Ewa) get pushed out.
   
   The oft-quoted Polish remarks about Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising "getting burned like bugs", although invariably presented as such, wasn't necessarily derogatory. After all, Poles used the same phrase to refer to themselves in the face of their defenselessness against German incendiary bombing during the Warsaw Uprising! (p. 200).
   
   The Germans strongly promoted alcoholism among Poles. This was done in order to degrade them (Lemkin elaborated on this) and to exploit this dependency as leverage in the denunciation of fugitive Jews (p. 174).
   
   Cyprys elaborates on the semi-collaborationist Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa): "There were policemen who would accept neither bribes nor ransoms but, for the sake of their ideology, would hand over the Jews. Looking at this group objectively, however, one has to say that among their ranks there were many Volksdeutsch volunteers. The activities of the Polish police aroused such hostility among the majority of the Polish people, that death sentences were passed on several policemen by the Polish underground organizations and executions were carried out by Polish lads...upon the orders of the Organization a detailed list of all policemen was kept in the Underground offices. These contained, apart from proved misconduct, evidence of their standard of living which ascertained whether a dark blue was profiteering from blackmail or extortion. These lists of evidence were kept till the Warsaw Uprising: I do not know whether they survived the insurrection." (p. 138).
   
   However, by no stretch of the imagination was the Polish Blue Police the main force in the roundups of Jews for their deaths: "On about 5 August [1942] all `workshop territories' were hermetically closed and the Germans and Ukrainians started a ruthless expulsion of anyone found outside these areas--always with the efficient help of the Jewish militia. Wherever a German or a Ukrainian did not venture the militia men would gladly fish out as many as possible of those still hidden in cellars and vaults, only to oblige the Germans." (p. 52).
   
   Most Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniki), "the scum of mankind" (p. 119), took only part of the belongings of their Jewish victims and didn't usually actually denounce Jews to the Germans (pp. 119-120). They sometimes excused their conduct by their poverty and even gave the Jews advice on how better to disguise their Jewishness (p. 140).
   
   Underworld Poles weren't the only ones that fugitive Jews feared: "The Jewish Gestapo men who remained alive were very dangerous. Their eyes were penetrating and Jews pointed out by them were lost beyond hope." (p. 165). Cyprys personally observed them shouting Jewish slogans or singing Jewish songs in order to provoke a telltale reaction in fugitive Jews among the pedestrians (pp. 165-166).
   
   Cyprys alludes to Zegota as follows: "It goes without saying that only a fraction of the Jews in hiding knew about the existence of this committee. Those who were in touch with the patriotic `Polish intelligentsia' or people who worked in the Underground were most likely to benefit. Everything was obviously carried out in the greatest secrecy, using all available means of security." (p. 150). Complaints about Zegota aiding only a modest number of Jews are clearly off the mark.
   
   In fact, Cyprys has a very sage understanding of ALL underground activities: "In reality underground activities were extremely stressful and required a great deal of steadiness and concentration. And because it had gone on for so many years, it was exhausting even to the strongest individuals and led to many casualties." (p. 184).
   
   Cyprys provides a level of detail about the Warsaw Uprising usually done by Polish authors. We read, for instance, about the devastating effects of the German nebelwerfer ("roaring cow" or "cupboard"), and the systematic destruction of Warsaw by Germans AFTER the Uprising.



2. It is ironic that the author of this amazing journal never saw her work published, instead it was her two daughters who published it after her death. It is a gripping read,and recounts how the author escapes a death train heading to Treblinka by sawing off the bars on the window of the train and jumping out of it into the wilderness, together with her 2 yr old daughter! It is so much more than an account of survival, it gives one pause for thought as to what one would do given similar circumstances...I myself am mother to a toddler, and reading this just made me feel connected to the author, in that I too would do anything for my child, but do I possess the same courage as Ruth? It's impossible to imagine her life in occupied Poland, trying to live on the Aryan side, amongst Gentiles, keeping her daughter amongst strangers, not knowing if she will be saved...this is an amazing account of a woman's courage, a mother's love, and undying faith.



3. I read this book about 6 years ago, in a period when I read every Holocaust testimony I could lay my hands on, to help me understand the first hand testimony I, alone, had received from a lifelong friend who herself survived the Vilna ghetto, and three concentration camps.
   
   As Cat R reports, the author's daughter found her mother's manuscript in 1979, after the former had died. The text gives a very personal account of the Nazi invasion of Poland, this one from the perspective of a Warsaw native shipped with her small daughter, in January 1943, aboard a cattle car from the ghetto, bound to a certain death at Treblinka.
   
   Certain except that she fought back. She knew from rumors what happened there. With a hacksaw blade she had concealed, she determined to saw through the bars of one of two small windows in her car, and reached them from the shoulders of two strong young boys willing to help her.
   
   To ensure that the boys threw her daughter out the window after she had jumped, Eva gave a bag of chocolate, sugar and bread to a sympathetic friend too old to join her, and asked her to ensure they got it if they did as she had asked.
   
   The jump was but the beginning of one Jewish mother's perilous and somehow miraculous bid to survive--with her child.
   
   In the end, this sufferings of this mother and child were far less severe than those of my friend Masha. Nevertheless, this is a gripping, and important account, not to be missed.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



4. This wartime memoir was discovered by the author's daughter in 1979, following her mother's death. It relates the events of the Nazi persecution in Poland, the suffering and degradation of the Warsaw Ghetto ... and an extraordinary courage and will to survive. Realizing the fate in store for her, Ruth made plans for escape. In the winter of 1943, she and two-year-old Eva were rounded up and crowded into a cattle-car for the fatal journey to Treblinka. A single chance for life remained to them: a perilous jump from the moving train. Their first night of freedom was spent huddling together in a freezing, abandoned dog-kennel, with Ruth licking her daughter's wounds. In their danger-fraught flight for survival, they encountered kind-hearted Catholics who risked their lives to aid a Jewish mother and child. This book is a powerful first-hand account of terrifying times, and a testimony to a mother's courage.



5. This would have to be one of the few diaries that tells the story of the horror of the Holocaust. Ruth lives through many tough situations, where her quick thinking saves her and her daughter Eva. It paints a clear picture of how people in Warsaw were treated, and how the Germans got rid of the Jews in the Ghetto and in Warsaw. It is rather sad, but it is true. If you read this story, you will learn first hand about the life that Jews lived in the Holocaust. I suggest reading it!