I first saw a picture of a lamp shade made from human skin when I was 9 years old. A documentary on television showed people collecting items for a museum of remembrance—maybe in New York, maybe in Jerusalem, I don't recall. I already had vague images of World War II from classmates whose grandparents and parents had lived through it. But the lamp shades were new to me. I sat frozen on our couch, wondering why no one had bothered to tell me this part of the story.
For a few years after this, I read every book I could find about World War II, looking for what else I'd missed. It seemed odd even then: I am not Jewish, and my family left Europe at the turn of the century. But I took my reading very seriously. War was not a game, as my mother shouted from the kitchen window whenever she caught us at play, belly-down in the dirt to escape from that day's enemy.
I hadn't thought much about this until a friend and I were talking about the childhood books we remembered most vividly. "Definitely the ones about World War II and the Holocaust," she said. We rattled off the titles, The Upstairs Room, I Am David, The Diary of Anne Frank. We recalled bitter tastes, horrible smells, adrenaline rushes of fear, the relief of liberation—sensations we'd read about years ago.
I've since found a number of people who also read these books voraciously. (I borrowed several books for this review from a colleague's 14-year-old daughter.) I have some theories as to why they won't leave your system. Children in these stories are real, flesh-and-blood heroes, not mythically brave, idealized ones. These "heroes" brood over hair texture and friends in the same breath with which they rant against God. They get irritated with parents and siblings, and then risk their lives to save them. The world is as horrible as they say it is, and there is no room for the adult chastisement that they'll understand when they're older. Surrounded by harsh brutality, they mature gently, learning about the strength of their own courage and gaining a little compassion for adult weakness.
This handful of books from the large and impressive "Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Juvenile literature" collection offers a real gift to young people of any age. Don't shy away from them because of their harsh subject—your kids can handle them.
THE DIARY OF Anne Frank is probably the best-known memoir of a child in hiding during the war. It has been republished this year, with additional material to paint a fuller picture of Anne's humanness. Most other memoirs were written after the war and, while they do not possess the same immediacy, are still worth reading.
Renee Roth-Hano's Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France is a recreated diary of the author's life in Alsace, Paris, and the convent in Normandy where she and her sisters are hidden for two years. Renee assumes responsibility for her younger sisters, all the while fighting her resentment over having to grow up so soon. The eclectic community of sisters and refugees at turns frustrates and delights her, and her deep love for and irritation at her mother is recounted with haunting accuracy.
Renee's struggle to reconcile being Jewish with the Catholic teaching she receives leads to a rich argument with her sisters about the doctrine of the Trinity. She tries out praying to Mary, hoping that she is not betraying her parents or her Judaism, providing a rare window into the theological struggles of childhood. Though generally well-written, the book suffers at those points where Renee sounds like Roth-Hano the grown woman after years of analysis instead of an adolescent girl chronicling the day's events.
The Upstairs Room is Joanna Reiss' account of her Jewish family's life in the Netherlands during the war. Reiss accomplishes the goal laid out in her introduction, to "write a simple, human book, in which my sister and I suffered and complained, and sometimes found fault with the Gentile family that took us in for a few years, in which the members of that family were not heroes but people, with strengths and weaknesses."
This plainly told story is free of incongruous analysis. The child's scope of vision is well-preserved, and Reiss limits the information offered to what she saw and heard as a child. We know with young Annie that her mother is sick; we feel the tension between Mr. and Mrs. Oostervelde—the family hiding them; we live in the uncertainty, fear, and hope only as Annie experiences them.
ACCOUNTS OF children in concentration camps are harder to read—for obvious reasons. There are no escapes offered, and readers feel the losses of freedom—from limited activity, to the Ghetto, to the work camps—with the same suffocation as the characters.
Survivor Livia Bitton-Jackson's I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust is a brilliantly told, haunting memoir. Elli (Bitton-Jackson's childhood name) and her family live through the Hungarian and then Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia, and are taken to Auschwitz. The relationship between Elli and her mother slowly shifts in the camp, as Elli cares for her mother, forcing her to eat, to continue on, to stand erect so she isn't sent to the gas chamber. Elli's courage to steal her mother from the infirmary so she will not be killed is not described heroically, but as a daughter desperate to ensure that she'll have a mother.
Like in The Upstairs Room, the narrative is limited to the information Elli had as a girl, and so the reader stands by helplessly as each unfathomable horror is realized. When her brother Bubi confirms the rumors of the gas chambers, Elli writes:
I had known about the gas chambers all along. The shadow of the gas chambers followed us even when we left Auschwitz. And yet, I had stubbornly clung to the myth of the camp for the children and the elderly....The Americans will be here soon, and we will be liberated. We will be freed—to face a world in which little children were gassed with their mothers. To face a world in which this was possible. My God. My God. I have just been robbed of my freedom.
Tatjana (Tanja) Wassiljewa was 13 when the Nazis invaded Leningrad. Hostage to War: A True Story is her story. This is a less powerful book than A Thousand Years, largely because Tanja was not Jewish and therefore experienced less brutality than Elli. Still, Tanja's experiences bear witness to the inconsistency of human kindness. Against her mother's wishes, she walks for days in search of food for her starving family. Some Russians have run out of compassion and harshly refuse to help her; some give her more than she asks for and refuse payment. Eventually Tanja is forced to go to Germany to work in a munitions factory, where she incurs the wrath of the overseers because she is young and weak.
A year after the war's end, Tanja finally returns to a disappointing homecoming. Her mother is very frail, her sister crippled due to starvation. She is interrogated by the Soviet police about what she did in the West and why it took her so long to come home. Paralleling Elli's awakening, Tanja bitterly realizes that she is not yet free from suspicion and hostility. The war is over, but the pain is not.
The developments in the lives of the children who survived the Holocaust is Gila Almagor's interest in Under the Domim Tree. Based on the author's youth, the story tells of life in an Israeli youth village in 1953. The characters are wonderfully developed; these are intelligent, sensitive young adults whose bittersweet journey to adulthood is made less harrowing by the family they create for each other.
The story is told through the eyes of Aviya, who, as a native-born Israeli (sabra), did not live through the Holocaust. Aviya watches her friends struggle to remember their parents and forget the horror of the war, as she struggles with her own past. Aviya does not know who her father was, nor why her family came to Israel, and her mother cannot talk about him. Whenever Aviya pushes too hard, her mother ends up catatonic and hospitalized.
This story explores the power and pain of remembering. Mira, a hostile, destructive newcomer, cannot remember anything about her life before Israel. Many of those who can remember refuse to talk about it. But slowly, gently, they move toward piecing their pasts together. There is a grace in memory returning when we can handle it, not before.
And that is the miracle of these books—that these children emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust still able to love, to laugh, and to care for others. In the midst of great brutality, girls recited psalms in their bunkers; defiant Polish peasant women threw bread to starving prisoners; simple, terrified farmers harbored children in their attics.
As a child, I thought that learning about every potential horror was the only way I would be able to withstand the atrocities when they came my way. Remembering the horror and the instances of compassion does not guarantee that there will never be another Holocaust. Yet with each new generation reading these stories, we just might catch a glimpse of who it is God means for us to be. By refusing to ignore the horror that is always just out of sight, maybe, just maybe, we'll live into God's intention.
The Diary of Anne Frank. By Anne Frank. Translated by Susan Massotty. AnchorBooks, 1997.
Hostage to War: A True Story. By Tatjana Wassiljewa. Translated by Anna Trenter. Scholastic press, 1997.
Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust. By Livia Bitton-Jackson. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Touch Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France. By Renee Roth-Hano. Puffin Books, 1989.
Under the Domim Tree. By Gila Almagor. Translated by Hillel Schenker. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
The Upstairs Room. By Joanna Reiss. Scholastic Press, 1972.
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