Coming Of Age In The Holocaust

'Among the most moving documents I have read in years ... You will not forget it' Elie Wiesel From her small, sunny hometown between the beautiful Carpathian Mountains and the blue Danube River, Elli Friedmann was taken - at a time when most girls are growing up, having boyfriends and embarking upon the adventure of life - and thrown into the murderous hell of Hitler's Final Solution. When Elli emerged from Auschwitz and Dachau just over a year later, she was fourteen. She looked like a sixty year old. This account of horrifyingly brutal inhumanity - and dogged survival - is Elli's true story.

A Junior Library Guild selection Claiming My Place is the true story of a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Nazi Germany and hiding in plain sight. Meet Barbara Reichmann, once known as Gucia Gomolinska: smart, determined, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. A Jew growing up in predominantly Catholic Poland during the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future. Her world is turned upside down when Nazis invade Poland and establish the first Jewish ghetto of World War II in her town of Piotrko ́w Trybunalski. As the war escalates, Gucia and her family, friends, and neighbors suffer starvation, disease, and worse. She knows her blond hair and fair skin give her an advantage, and eventually she faces a harrowing choice: risk either the uncertain horrors of deportation to a concentration camp, or certain death if she is caught resisting. She decides to hide her identity as a Jew and adopts the gentile name Danuta Barbara Tanska. Barbara, nicknamed Basia, leaves behind everything and everyone she has ever known in order to claim a new life for herself. Writing in the first person, author Planaria Price and Helen Reichmann West, Barbara's daughter, bring the immediacy of Barbara’s voice to this true account of a young woman whose unlikely survival hinges upon the same determination and defiant spirit already evident in the six-year-old girl we meet as this story begins. The final portion of this narrative, written by Helen, completes Barbara’s journey from her immigration to America until her natural, timely death. Includes maps and photographs

This book is an important work in Holocaust literature and was originally published in Poland in 1967. Covering the years 1939-1945, it is the author's account of her experience growing up in the Warsaw ghetto and her eventual deportation to, imprisonment in, and survival of the Majdanek, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Neustadt-Glewe camps. Since the old, the weak, and children were summarily executed by the Nazis in these camps, Mrs Birenbaum's survival and coming of age is all the more remarkable. Her story is told with simplicity and clarity and the new edition contains revisions made by the author to the original English translation, and is expanded with a new epilogue and postscripts that bring the story up to date and complete the circle of Mrs Birenbaum's experiences.

Toni Goldblatt’s awakening to forbidden desire in 1960s Montreal conflicts with the expectations of her Holocaust-scarred parents; she flees to Israel in an attempt to reinvent herself, but the Zionist dream doesn’t save her. Only on her return home, where she discovers kindred spirits in the underground lesbian scene, does Toni begin the accept the truth about herself.

A groundbreaking second-generation memoir of the Holocaust and its legacy by Otto Frank’s goddaughter—“The extraordinary tale is heroic” (The New York Times). Rita Goldberg recounts the extraordinary story of her mother, Hilde Jacobsthal, a close friend of Anne Frank’s family who was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, Hilde fled to Belgium, living out the war years in an extraordinary set of circumstances—first among the Resistance, and then at Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. In the words of The Guardian, the story is “worthy of a film script.” As astonishing as Hilde’s story is, Rita herself emerges as the central character in this utterly unique memoir. Proud of her mother and yet struggling to forge an identity in the shadow of such heroic accomplishments—not to mention her family’s close relationship to the iconic Frank family—Goldberg offers an unflinching look at the struggles faced by children and grandchildren whose own lives are haunted by historic tragedy. Motherland is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research. It is an epic story of survival, adventure, and new life. “A double memoir that braids her parents’ story with her own, and succeeds in articulating a difficult truth.” —The Economist

The bulk of this work consists of the presentation of the edited narratives of 18 Holocaust survivors. The narratives were edited to focus attention on practical and emotional survival strategies they practiced during their ordeal, with an eye towards discovering later effects. In the final chapter, the author presents a sociological theory dubbed the "Challenged Identity Model," in which she posits that challenged identity, interactional emergents, and survival communality combine to allow survivors to acquire the means to rename the coordinates of their own existence and identify others within them. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR