5 comments about Inge: A Girl's Journey Through Nazi Europe.

1. Much has been written about the millions who were murdered during the Nazis' Holocaust bestiality yet we know less about the effect on thousands of child survivors who suffered separation from family, deprivation and often multiple escapes during World War II. In "Inge" author Gumpert vividly portrays the anxieties and trauma of an innocent young girl under the duress of separation, escape and living on the margin. Inge discovers herself and turns from introvert to courageous escape artist, outwitting adult persecutioners. We also learn about selfless and heroic rescuers. It is fascinating to discover her interactions with peers and even the advent of teenage love during her turbulent youth.

   The book vividly presents the gripping dangers and escapades of Inge's teenage years. Even more important, the author reveals Inge's lifelong and unsuccessful struggle to cope with the memories. One feels the author has perhaps finally provided the peace and redemption which escaped Inge during her lifetime.

   As a fellow teenage refugee with Inge in 1940-41 (her first love was my best friend Walter), I knew the facts, but I am deeply moved by the compelling story told by this book.




2. Most books on the Holocaust reflect the horrible trials of those murdered or sent to Concentration Camps. This is a story of a young girl sent by her family to Belgium from Germany before the war. She is tossed into the whirlwind of war and her separation from her family is greatly traumatic for her. She faces her difficult teen years as a refugee in Southern France. The North of France is occupied by the Nazis, who ultimately control the French Government, both north and south. Each year she grows closer to her 18th birthday, she is painfully aware of the French laws will allow her to be turned over to the Nazis and deported. She is not alone in her travail. This story tells of the genuine goodness of those who helped shelter her and get her and many of her friends to Switzerland. There is love, loss and decency. A really different prospective. Should be read by all.



3. This book takes you into the life of Inge Joseph who lived threw the Holocaust, but ultimitly could not get past it.
   
   Inge Joseph was born in Darmstadt, Germany in 1925. She had an older sister and loving parents. When she was young Hitler took power and her life changed. In 1936 her father got arrested and shortly afterwards her sister then 16 went to live in America eventually living in Chicago.
   
   Inge and her mother remained in Darmstadt with the help of her father's wealthy cousin. During this time however Inge left Darmstadt and went to live with her cousin in Belgium. After only living with him a short time he and his wife sent her to live in a hostil run by Mr. and Mrs. Frank (no relation to Anne.) After living there a while, the Nazis invaded Belgium and the Franks sent the girls to France with a group of boys from another hostil in the town they lived in.
   
   The 100 kids went to France and stayed in a barn for a while, until the Swiss Red Cross got involved helping them with food, and finding them a castle to live in.
   
   Life was not easy in the barn or castle, but Inge and some of her friends found love. During the time in the castle the oldest of the children were arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but managed to go back to Chateau le Haille (the castle). Several months later the person in charge decided that the oldest ones needed to escape.
   
   After a failed escape leading to the deaths of Inge's friend and boyfriend Inge made it to Switzerland and finally to the United States to reunite with her father and sister.
   
   Inge tried to get over her experiences, married a Austrian Jew and adopted a daughter named Julie, and also became a nurse. Unfortunitly she was not able to and became addicted to medication that caused her to die in 1983.
   
   A very interesting story, one can't forget



4. I won't go into a synopsis since the readers before me have very detailed ones.
   I checked this one out from the local library. I could not put it down. I was able to finish in 2 days. I found myself following her on her journey. The book is very well written and really involves the reader in what life may have been like for her. I am purchasing this one to keep on my shelf. Definitely worth reading and rereading.



5. Unlike many books about the Holocaust this one is truly different in its ending. Suffuring a fate like the Jewish in WWII is not imaginable and this books takes you to a girl and the trials she faced trying to survive and stay connected with her family. This books is an inspiring story of a young girl who tries to survive the terrible fate of her people while trying to stay with her family and the repercussions of this horrible time will never be healed. Although Inge does not get to finish the book herself, her nephew does a great job finishing where she left off. If you like emotional stories that suck you in and you don't want to put the book down, you will love this book!

No comments about Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons.

No comments about Escape through the Balkans: The Autobiography of Irene Grunbaum.

5 comments about Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz.

1. My review is best expressed in a letter to the authors. While the letter speaks little of the content of the story, it does the reflections of the reader:

   I have just finished your book, Alma Rosé, Vienna to Auschwitz and felt compelled to write a word of thanks for such an excellent book. I have lived in Vienna for 23 years and in our early years I walked by the Rosé house in the Pyrkergasse each day, taking our oldest to the Volkschule. Of course, at that time, I had no idea the importance of number 23. Through your book and others of Viennese history I have gained a profound sense of history that a midwest American, growing up in the suburbs, rarely has a chance to learn.

   We have since moved from the 19th district, but each time I am in the city the enormity of life that has gone on before me deeply tugs at my soul. The stones I walk on have carried the lives of so many, each woven into a history of joy and often of utter loss and evil.

   I believe your book was one of those that has allowed me to enter into a life past. Through it I have gained new perspective that the joy and beauty I now enjoy is not without the marring of tragedy and sorrow of many who were innocent. I was also able with my family to visit Auschwitz this summer. The visit has left a lasting impact on our minds and it certainly allowed me to have even deeper sense of personal presence as I read your book. The immensity of the tragedy leaves one lost for thoughts and words. The life of Alma Rosé puts a reality to that part of history that seems unbelievable, yet was played out in the very places I have lived and walked.

   I visited the Rosé grave in Grinzing last week and noted that Alma's name is inscribed on the headstone (unfortunately, the date is 4/4/44 and not 5/4/44). In honor of her courage and for the lives she most certainly helped spare, I left a memorial candle on her grave. I did not seem fitting to leave the grave without some acknowledgement and sign of respect of her family's life.

   Again, thank you for the fine research and excellent presentation of her life. The book must also be considered a memorial not just to one life, but to many who's stories will never be told.




2. Richard Newman has spent many years working on this book and it paid off, there can't be a biography on hardly anyone that is better researched. And he has written it in a way that doesn't judge the person, he relates the facts but doesn't try any psychological insight. He leaves this up to the reader. A beautiful, compelling book on a woman that used a difficult position to save as many lives as possible. If ever anyone deserved a monument, it is Alma Rosé. Richard Newman`s book lays the foundation. I will publish the German version in Fall 2002.



3. Alma Rose was born to musical royalty in Vienna (the daughter of famed violinist Arnold Rose and niece of Gustav Mahler). She studied with distinction at the Vienna Conservatory and the Vienna State Academy, and consequently enjoyed a very respectable and successful musical career. In 1932 Alma formed a women's orchestra (Vienna Waltzing Girls) and toured throughout Europe. But like so many others of her class and background, she was totally caught off guard by the Nazi onslaught. Courageously assisting her family's flight from the Nazi's antisemitic pogroms, she was nonetheless caught and sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. There she took a group of terrified and untrained women and transformed them into an orchestra whose music saved them from being summarily gassed by their Nazi captors. Forty women were to survive that horrific place because of their participation in Alma's prisoner orchestra. But Alma herself was to die of illness in the camps before they were able to be liberated by the Allies. A welcome contribution to Holocaust studies, as well as a brilliantly presented biography of a gifted musician, Alma Rose: Vienna To Auschwitz is a memorial to a gifted musician and a testament to Alma's personal struggle to help as many women survive as she could. It is also a damning indictment of the Nazi horror and an effective counter to the pernicious attempts of historical revisionists to suppress both the atrocities and the courage of those dark times.



4. Alma Rose was an incredible human being. After spending the last few evenings immersed in her biography "Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz", I was touched by her ability to use her violin to transcend the evil around her.
   Alma was born into the musical elite of turn-of-the-last-century Vienna, the capital of arts and music in Europe. Her uncle was Gustav Mahler and her father, Arnold Rose, the famous concertmaster and conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. She had a fabled childhood surrounded by musicians and artists.
   
   Alma studied violin from her father at an early age and later with Sevcik. She toured Europe as concertmistress of an all women's orchestra she organized, and was briefly married to violin virtuoso Vasa Prihoda.
   
   All of the fame and glamour ended however when she was captured and interned in the dreaded Auschwitz. Fearing that she was about to be eliminated she asked for her last wish to be able to play the violin. Word quickly spread that she was the Alma Rose of the Rose Quartet and before she knew it, the camp supervisor, assigned her to lead a women's orchestra. For many of the players, the orchestra was the only chance of survival. Alma took pity on people who auditioned and tried to fit them in, whether it was as accordion player, or guitarist, or if they had no playing talent, as copyist and scribe. She took her job seriously, practicing 10-12 hours a day in addition to giving "concerts". All this was under the constant stress and threat of elimination if they did not prove their worthiness to the SS in charge.
   
   Alma maintained a musicality, and in those moments while playing music, they were transported out of their nightmare and back to the preWar Vienna, playing in a cafe. The music also affected both SS and prisoners alike, and on the Sunday concerts, prisoners strained to hear and grasp a small slice of beauty while SS overlords sat in the front row weeping with emotion. How they could love music so much and then turn around and kill mercilessly was beyond the comprehension of the survivors.
   
   Alma saved the lives of many women, and even though she perished, her bravery and dedication lives on in the stories of the survivors she helped.
   
   The author Richard Newman based the book on firsthand knowledge, primary sources such as letters and interviews with survivors, relatives, friends and contemporaries. He maintained a historical accuracy and honest portrayal of Alma's life. You will be touched while unable to grasp the enormity of the horrors that faced the people who were interned in the death camps.
   
   I read this book alongside with "Night" by Elie Wiesel who arrived at Auschwitz shortly before Alma's death. Both books are highly recommended although extremely sad, they show the resilience of the human spirit in absolutely horrible conditions.



5. "Alma Rose: Vienna to Auschwitz" by Richard Newman with Karen Kirtley is the kind of biography I enjoy most. The author provides the reader with not only a fascinating story of the Rose family but also brings to life the time in which these people lived. We see Alma' s life as a privileged young girl and woman. The many twists and turns of fate, poor judgement and unfortunate circumstances brings her to Auschwitz toward the end of WW11. Her time in the concentration camp reveals a remarkable individual existing under the most inhuman conditions. Her talent and strength of character resulted in her saving the lives of many woman who were members in the women's orchestra, of which she was the leader. An excellent, informative and ultimately powerful read.

2 comments about Anne Frank: REFLECTIONS ON HER LIFE AND LEGACY.

1. As part of my effort to learn my role as the dentist in the 1955 version of the play at the local junior college, I read some 14 or 15 books by and about Anne Frank and this one capped my study quite nicely. I recommend it as the one to read after "The Definitive Edition" (or the fascinating "Critical Edition", if you're up to that), Willy Lindwer's "The Last Seven Months", Melissa Muller's "Anne Frank: The Biography", Miep Gies' "Anne Frank Remembered", and Eva Schloss' "Eva's Story". It's scholarly, well edited and footnoted, and has a fine bibliography.



2. In this book the editors have selected thirty-one excerpts from various writings about Anne Frank and collected them together under four basic ideas: Anne's life, Anne as a writer, Anne on stage & screen and Anne in relationship to the Holocaust. Overall the selection of the writings is very good. They are of high quality and of varying points of view, particularly with reference to the last three sections of the book.
   
   For example, there is considerable difference of opinion to Anne's ability as a writer, some find her skills exceptional while others think her ability overrated despite her impact. Better known are the arguments over whether the play and movie produced from Anne's diary truly reflected the "real" Anne. Then there are the arguments, growing in recent years, as to whether Anne's diary is an "accurate" or "important" portrayal of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. I may not agree with Lawrence L. Langer's assessment that the diary is not a "vital text" of the Holocaust but seeing his point of view allows me to think a little deeper about my own position. And therein lies the book's real strength.
   
   Ultimately, though the excerpts are brief and it's easy to plow through them rather quickly, this book can open one's eyes. Some of the material I had read before in other places but I was very glad to encounter the wide points of view that the editors were able to gather. The fact that Anne's single work still has the power to generate such scholarship 60 years later seems to point out its continuing importance in our experience.

5 comments about Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: A Holocaust Childhood.

1. As one of her acquaintances who has been urging Mrs. Bikales to finish her memoir of a childhood journey through wartime Europe, I am delighted with the result. Her book reads like a thriller as she and her mother move from one place to another to avoid the impositions of Nazi tyranny. There are warm allusions to the importance of family and survival as well as the kindness of strangers, all in the context of innocent childhood thrust into the cauldron of hatred and violence. In these times, when so many would have us suspend memory of the Holocaust by revising history, it is ever more important to have the witnesses share their stories. Gerda Bikales has shared hers, adding to the treasury of important memory. Her writing is exceptional, with the photographs bringing one family's unique existence into focus. Yet, one realizes that this family's history is symbolic of so many more in their various experiences during a tragic and unforgettable time.



2. This is a remarkable true-life account of refugee flight from the Third Reich as seen through the eyes of a precocious young girl. Full of unforgettable characters, it is the amazing story of a mother and daughter's courageous escape across the darkening landscape of World War II Europe. At times more incredible than fiction, this well-written book brings history to life in a way that the reader will never forget. I cannot recommend it too highly.



3. A childhood spent on the run from Nazis, in Poland, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy: what a memoir. It reminds us that even Holocaust survivors who escaped the concentration camps could hardly find a day of rest from the major and the petty harassment visited on them by Nazis. Gerda Bikales seems to have remembered every home or shed that offered her and her mother shelter, and she is generous in thanking those who helped. Remarkable that she is not bitter, but grateful for survival, that she was able to stay with her mother until almost the end, and was reunited with her eventually, and most of all that she was able to enter the United States and make a happy adult life. An amazing book. I recommend it heartily to Amazon's readers.



4. Gerda Bikales' story of her Jewish childhood in hiding in Hitler's Europe is told with a novelist's feel for scene and character - and terror. It is also authentic. There are no tortures or eyewitness murders to harrow those with little stomach for atrocities. Rather this is a profoundly moving story of the WWII through the half-comprehending eyes of child, a girl aged eight to 12, on the run for her life. Occasionally she grabs snatches of education in different countries and different languages but mostly she lives in hiding, afraid and observing with extraordinary sensitivity. Unlike many stories of this kind this one has a happy ending. If you are used to thinking about political events as semi-abstract movements and isms this book will provide a different perspective.



5. I doubt that one could find any reliable estimates of the number of Jews who managed to survive the Final Solution by fleeing their homes, moving from country to country, crossing borders illegally, hiding, assuming false identities, relying on the help of strangers, and going without. It must have been at least in the hundreds of thousands; more likely in the millions. Intelligence, physical stamina, and psychological fortitude all increased one's chances of surviving on the run, but luck, good or bad, weighed in again and again and again.
   The author was eight years old in 1939, when she and her mother left their home in Breslau, Germany. For the next four years, the two traveled from place to place in Belgium and France. They did not entirely elude the Nazis; at one point, they were held in an internment camp called "Zwartberg" in the Province of Limburg, Belgium. The years of flight were years of fear, anxiety, hunger, and cold. Gerda's memoir of this difficult time is a treasure. It is rich in detail and well-written, but it also something more. Although any semblance of a normal childhood was taken from her, she nevertheless experienced the struggle for survival through the eyes of a child. Here it must be noted that the young Gerda Bierzonski was unusually astute and observant, able to grasp much of what was going on around her and inclined to wonder. She has managed to capture her child's-eye view in the book. She has also succeeded in weaving into the narrative a sufficient amount of general historical information, enabling the reader to place her journey in the proper context.

5 comments about The Net of Dreams: A Family's Search for a Rightful Place.

1. This is the most moving story of Holocaust survivors that I have ever read. While it does a great job describing author's parents' experiences in concentration camps, what makes it unique is its ability to also show how victims of that horror were able to put their lives back together and not be defeated by it. I also was moved by the author's own journey of discovery about her parents and who they were, aside from their identity as Survivors. All of us, I think, would relish the opportunity to really know who their parents are



2. Julie Salamon is a friend and a person I respect mightily, so I am not exactly objective. Nevertheless, I found her discovery of her family's history--and her trip to the death camps with her mother--remarkable and so compelling that I was unable to put it down. I read the book in 1996 and though I buy, read and donate hundreds of books a year, this one remains in our library. It will be a good resource for our children as they learn of the effects of the Holocaust on us all--and of human ability to overcome horrors. Alyssa A. Lappen



3. I have been searching for this book for several years and I have finally found it(I forgot the title so it's been a long search)!I read it years ago and was moved to tears many times. Ms. Salamon describes her mothers history in such a way that you feel like you were right there with her. You can feel her joy and her pain. You get to know her before the war touched her life and all the way through her move to America and the start of her family. This was the only book I have ever read that I could not put down! It's unbelievably good!



4. There is so much in this book...the history of Julie Salamon's parents Szimi and Sanyi Salamon, Jewish Holocaust survivors, it is the story of their lives before the war, what they endured and lost during the war, how they survived and met and ended up creating a nice 'American' family.
   
   Julie Salamon's personal journey includes many interesting anecdotes, a detailed family tree and insight in to her mother's seemingly neurotic ideas about life. Her mother possessed this amazing insanity, where she was able to think the wonderful while enduring the unspeakable.
   
   I thought it was so interesting to hear how Jews who survived the Holocaust would express distain for other surviving Jews because they were Polish or Hungarian or Russian. It seems that this pecking order that we endure and perpetrate against others is sometimes what gets us through our lot in life.
   
   Julie, her mother and step-father take a trip to Poland to visit in Huszt and tour Auschwitz. During their travels her mother tells her many stories of her experience during her imprisonment in the concentration camp, things she never spoke of before. I thought it so insightful to describe the time after liberation as Genesis Day One, a vast re-creation.
   
   I thought this was a very well told and well written history. My only criticism is that I felt this story was unfinished. Of course it's her life and she living so to a certain extent I certainly expected her story to continue after the book was done. But I was left to wonder how did her mother cope with the death of her father. How did she find her second husband Arthur? Did her mother find any peace in going back to Poland and Auschwitz?
   
   Perhaps she will write another book so I can find out!



5. This book begins in 1993, when the author travels to Poland and to her parents' hometown of Huszt, Hungary (now Khust, Ukraine), together with her mother and stepfather, to rediscover her family's past and how it has shaped them and continues to influence them. Originally just Ms. Salamon was going to go to Poland, where Steven Spielberg was filming 'Schindler's List,' but her mother insisted she come along too, and that her stepfather, who had been a partisan, would come too. During their visit to Auschwitz and Huszt, Ms. Salamon began discovering a lot of things about her parents' past that she hadn't known before, or hadn't known about in such detail.
   
   Her parents were from Carpathian Rus, a region that had changed hands numerous times between Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, and Czechoslovakia over the years. They had always thought of themselves as cultured Czechs and therefore superior to the shtetl Jews in places like Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine. The area they lived in, however, was eventually annexed to Hungary during the course of the war, and they found themselves suffering the same fate as Hungarian Jewry when the Nazis invaded in March of 1944 and herded them all into ghettoes. Ms. Salamon's mother Szimi (Lilly), twenty-one at the time of deportation, managed to survive through her friendship with two sisters and an amazing belief that this wasn't really so bad, that she was going to get through it and was never in any real danger in spite of what a deadly dangerous place she was in. Her father Sanyi (Alexander), who was significantly older than her mother (about thirteen and a half years), lost his first wife and child in one of the deportations, but survived first with the partisans and then in Dachau, due to his privileged position as a respected talented doctor. After the war they reconnected and began a new life together, together with their surviving friends and relatives, first in Prague, then in New York, where some of their relatives had been living for a long time, and finally in the small town of Seaman, Ohio. Through this journey through her family's past, Ms. Salamon discovered how a lot of these events had significantly shaped their lives as she grew up, without even realising it. And unlike some books about the Shoah, this one has a much longer timeframe; it covers their lives before, during, and after the war, not just shortly before the war, during the war, and for a short period afterwards. It takes the journey into 1971, when her father died.
   
   My only complaint about the book is that it does somewhat feel as though it ends in media res. Perhaps there could have been a few more chapters to give more of a feeling of closure, covering such things as how the family dealt with Dr. Salamon's death in the immediate aftermath, how her mother met her stepfather Arthur, and whatever happened to her maternal aunts who had immigrated to Israel before it was too late. But overall it provides a fascinating portrait of one family's bittersweet history and how for many people, the war wasn't really over in 1945.

No comments about Dr. Elkhanan Elkes of the Kovno Ghetto: A Son's Holocaust Memoir.

5 comments about Triumph of Hope : From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel.

1. I finished reading Triumph of Hope this morning, after starting it two days ago. I simply couldn't put it down. The author, Ruth Elias, is nothing less than extraordinary. The way that she expresses her memories, through her style of writing and description, helps us to get one step closer to understanding an experience, which we can never really comprehend, because we were not there. Mrs Elias's life is remarkable, and through reading her book I thoroughly believe that she is a genuinely lovely, kind and warm person. It is such a tragedy that the Jewish people of her generation went through turmoil and absolute hell. But through this book, Ruth's aims - to spread the message that the discrimination and racism they experienced should never be repeated - are being achieved when a single person reads her book. Her message is being spread over the world, and I am glad that i was able to read Triumph of Hope. I intend to share this book with my family and friends, so that they can read of such an incredible woman, and a generation of people who refused to give in. I sincerely recomend this book to anyone who is thinking of buying this, for themselves or for others.



2. This book never lags and never loses your interest. It is very well written. It is an inspiring and insightful account of a woman's courage and determination to survive the Holocaust. I only wish the book continued because I wanted more. Very highly recommended.



3. I have read dozens of Holocaust memoirs, and although they are always touching and intense, none have caused me to feel such grief for the author as this one. I literally had to stop reading and bawl my eyes out for a good 10 minutes. This woman endured so much, and with such grace, that you cannot help but be invested in her story. Highly recommended.



4. This memoir goes to show that, despite what some people might say, it really is true that no two Shoah memoirs and experiences are exactly alike. Rutinko Huppner (now Ruth Elias) grew up in a rather wealthy family in the former Czechoslovakia, and after her young mother divorced her father when she was 6 years old, Rutinko and her older sister Edith were raised by a single father, with help from their uncle Hugo (their father's brother) and his wife Irma, along with a whole slew of grandparents and other aunts and uncles. Later on their father remarried, though Ruth and her sister, teenagers by then, really resented their stepmother and tried everything they could to make her life miserable. Being wealthy, Rutinko and Edith had access to things that their friends, neighbors, and classmates could only dream about, such as sausage for school lunch, a car, being driven to and from school, vacations in the mountains, musical instruments and music lessons, and a lot of other great stuff. They even had the money and connections to get permission and papers to leave Czechoslovakia for England after the Nazi takeover in 1939, though she and her sister decided not to go through with it due to their father's ill health and wanting the family to stay together through this difficult time.
   
   The family were able to go into hiding in a few different cities, where they enjoyed a relatively secure and happy life. Ruth and Edith even found the time to have romances and to be active in a secret Jewish youth group. However, there was eventually a raid on the area, and Ruth, Edith, their father and stepmother, and their aunt Irma were taken away to Theresienstadt (Terezin). Their uncle Hugo wasn't taken because he was very sick in the hospital and dying of cancer. Once in the large ghetto, they found themselves separated from their father, since men and women were quartered separately. However, shortly before they arrived, Ruth's boyfriend Koni and his own family had been deported, and this relationship ended up saving her life, since if Koni hadn't married her while she was sick in the hospital, she would have been deported along with the rest of her family when they were. From this point on out Ruth was along but for the friends she made, and she and Koni weren't even able to properly live together as husband and wife for some time. However, even in the ghetto love blossomed, and eventually Ruth discovered she was pregnant. After doing absolutely everything to try to find a doctor who would give her an abortion, she ended up being deported when she was two months pregnant, and was one of the few women who survived in that condition instead of being murdered on arrival. A lot of circumstances came together to save her life and to keep her alive even in spite of her condition, many of them decisions she had only a split second to make if she wanted to live. Eventually she had to make the most difficult and heartrending decision of all when her baby was born, so that the infamous "Dr." Mengele wouldn't kill them both.
   
   Once she was no longer pregnant, Ruth was viewed as a healthy fit young worker, and was transferred, along with her friend Berta, who had also been pregnant, to Taucha, a subcamp of Buchenwald. In this camp, they were put into a special privileged work detail, which accounted for their eventual survival. After being liberated, their group of Czechs made their way home and found that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, their loved ones just were not coming home and that they'd had to start over again from scratch. I was surprised to learn that many young people like Ruth and her boyfriend Kurt just lived together after the war instead of getting married, since they had to wait two years before their missing spouses could legally be considered dead, even though everyone knew what had most likely befallen them. Ruth also had to make the difficult decision to divorce her husband, who had survived as well, because they'd just grown apart and she felt he hadn't acted very appropriately towards her when they were in the Family Camp at Auschwitz. A few relatives came back, but no one from her immediate family. It was with this new family of two that she left Czechoslovakia for Israel shortly after independence was declared, and just in the nick of time, before the Czech borders became closed.
   
   Mrs. Elias went through some of the worst things imaginable (a number of times she even writes about how hard it was to just almost matter-of-factly type such heavy words like "None survived" or "They were probably all gassed"), and yet she came through everything alive and determined to start again, to make a new life for herself in her own homeland, to make sure that no one ever looked down on her or abused her ever again. It just goes to show that the human spirit is an amazing thing.



5. I read Holocaust memoirs because of my need to learn more of what my people went through during this time of hell on earth. How hard it must be to write down and re-live this part of one's life. After reading many such memoirs, Ruth Elias's story was extremely powerful to me, in that she is a woman (like me), married (like me) and a mother (like me). She survived through the most horrific and unspeakable horror that can befall a human being. How many of us could survive under these conditions, and yet continue to live, really live, and experience more of the good in other people and in life? She was capable of literally starting over and telling others about her experience. What a wonderful, strong and intelligent woman she is! Don't miss this one. I'm going to make it a permanent part of my book collection.

3 comments about Petit Claude: The Orphan of Auschwitz.

1. We always hear about all the terrible things that happened in World War II - how a whole nation ultimately colluded with a psychopath who managed to wreak havoc across the entire world and how millions of people suffered and died for no reason at all. It can lead to a very depressing conclusion about human nature and the world we live in.

   So with that in mind, its very refreshing to read a book like this which is about two unlikely lovers, a German and a Frenchwoman, who dared to stand against the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Vichy France, risking their lives to save that of a young Jewish boy whose family are, one by one, murdered by the Nazis. There is no more powerful way of understanding the real horror of what the Nazi's committed and also of what an impact one person's decision to do the right thing can have.

   The orphan's two rescuers are actually the author's own parents and one gets the sense that this book is as much a personal voyage to understand her parents as it is to relay a heroic tale. As such the intricacies and contradictions of their characters come across in a very compelling and intriguing way.

   Overall, I found "The Orphan of Auschwitz" both depressing and hopeful, tragic and heroic. It certainly gives an astonishing insight into the lives of real people living and fighting in that extraordinary period and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in how the moral dilemmas of the war forced ordinary people into leading extraordinary lives.




2. This book is an honest and moving true account of an unusual situation: a French woman and a German man protecting a little Jewish boy during World War II. The resolve and nationalities of the couple add a new dimension to our understanding of the complexity of French and German resistance.



3. Recently I met Agnes Seugnet, author of a newly published book called, "Petit Claude The Orphan Of Auschwitz And His French Rescuers." This is a true story of the rescue of a little Jewish boy in France during the time of the Holocaust. The couple that sheltered and nurtured the child during the war was Mrs. Seugnet's parents. They were members of the French resistance. It is an emotional and very sincere book that can be enjoyed by both teenagers and adults.

   Mrs. Seugnet's book is very important. She is a direct link to the Holocaust experience and is willing to share it with others. By reading the book, teenagers can acquire a much deeper and more immediate understanding of the Holocaust. This experience led to my discussing the Holocaust with my own family. I urge other families to talk to their children about these events. To those families with survivors I urge the survivors to talk to their children and grandchildren for you are a link to the past. As Mrs. Seugnet puts it, it is your "duty to share the memory."