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Arts & Entertainment

Keeping The Story Compelling

A Yom HaShoah roundup of recent Holocaust books that crosses all genres.

Suzanne Chessler

Special to the Jewish News

T

he psychological weight of
the Holocaust bears down in
diverse ways each year as
survivors, their children and scholars
confront experiences and perspectives in
new books about the devastating events,
remembered each year on Yom HaShoah,
which this year falls on April 15.
This year's releases have a number of
texts accompanied by pictures — cher-
ished family photos and expressive
illustrations. Summaries of the latest
volumes follow:

MEMOIRS

Artist Bernice
Eisenstein learned
about the Holocaust
from her parents,
both survivors relo-
cated to Canada, and
expresses the emo-
tional impact on her
life with narrative and
illustrations in I Was a Child of Holocaust
Survivors (Riverhead Books; $23.95).

France becomes a dream attraction for
art historian Eunice Lipton, whose outlook
builds on the fantasies of her father, but
the reality takes on different dimensions
as she confronts the country's history of
anti-Semitism, including its betrayal of

Jews to the Nazis, in French Seduction:
An American's Encounter with France,
Her Father and the Holocaust (Carroll &
Graf; $23.95). Lipton is married to former

Detroiter Ken Aptekar, an artist.

Survivor Martin Gray gets a second chance
in life with a new family only to encoun-
ter a different kind of devastation in For
Those I Loved (Hampton Roads; $21.95), an
updated version on the 35th anniversary of
the first edition.

Ida Piller-Greenspan was married in Belgium
on May 9,1940, the night the Nazis invaded,
and spent months trying to find another
country to enter, a drama described, with
the help of Susan Branting, in When the
World Closed Its Doors: Struggling to
Escape Nazi-Occupied Europe (Paradigm
Publishers; $21.95).

Basia Padocwicz, a Warsaw socialite who
had left child-rearing to a governess, takes
charge of her son, Julian, to save their lives
during World War II, and he tells their story
in Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw
1939 (Academy Chicago Publishers; $27.50).

DIARIES

Mary Berg escaped the Nazis aboard a
mercy ship hired by the American govern-
ment, and her experiences are republished
in The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing
up in the Warsaw Ghetto ... (Oneworid
Publications; $24.95.)

In Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story (Free Press; $26), Ann Kirschner
presents readers with the extraordinary gift her mother, Sala, gave her: the
large cache of family letters written, received, smuggled and preserved during
years of captivity and hiding.
Sala was 16 in 1940 when she took her older but less
robust sister Raizel's place in a Nazi slave labor camp in
Upper Silesia for what was billed as six weeks of factory
work; she emerged from that lesser known, but no less grim
network of Nazi war-effort labor camps some five years
later.
At war's end, of Sala's closely knit extended family of 50,
only she and two of her sisters remained to tell the tale. But
they chose not to — until, facing a life-threatening operation
in 1991, Sala gave her daughter the 352 documents she had
taken upon herself, at great personal risk, to salvage as a form of witness to
those years. Fortunately, Sala survived her surgery — and gave her blessing to
Kirschner to tell her story.
Kirschner quotes many of those letters here, and the raw immediacy of the
emotions they capture is so wrenching one begins to understand why Sala
could not bear to reopen them — and the countless losses, blow by blow, they
chronicle — for so many decades.

- Diane Cole

ow ,

The Diary of Petr
Ginz 1941-1942
(Atlantic Monthly
The Diary
Press; $24) captures
of
the experiences of a
young prodigy, whose
writing and artistic
,.>< skills were destroyed
in the cruelty of Auschwitz, where he per-
ished at age 16. His diaries recently were
discovered in a Prague attic.

NONFICTION

Like Art Spiegelrnan in Maus, in Mendel's Daughter: A Memoir (Free Press;
$19.95), Martin Lemelman turns to the newly popular genre of graphic (i.e.,
illustrated) narrative to present the horrific tale of a parent's survival in Hitler's
Europe.
At first glance, Lemelman's deceptively simple children's-
book-style black-and-white drawings and the accompany-
ing Yiddish-inflected first-person testimony of his mother,
Gusta, might lull the reader into thinking this will be a cozy
fairy tale of a loving shtetl world that is no more.
But with the Nazi onslaught, any hint of sentimental-
ity quickly disappears, and Lemelman's straightforward
presentation makes the devastation depicted all the more
harrowing.
Only by — quite literally — going underground did Gusta
manage to survive, hiding out for three years with her two brothers and sister
in a series of primitive, grave-like bunkers they dug for themselves in the for-
ests and fields outside the Polish-Ukrainian shtetl that had been their home.
Having retold his mother's tale, it is no wonder Lemelman concludes this
powerful volume with the words of the Passover Haggadah: "In every genera-
tion, one must look upon himself as if he personally came out of Egypt."

- Diane Cole

42

April 12 2007

Produced under
the auspices of Yad
Vashem, Mordecai
Paldiel's The
vr
~ k
A
Righteous Among the
Nations: Rescuers
of Jews During the
Holocaust (Collins;
$59.95) gathers some of the most moving
and riveting biographies from the Righteous
Among the Nations, those people who
risked their lives to save Jews during World
War II.

F 41A1

Arabs who helped Jews escape the
Holocaust are described in Among
the Righteous: Lost Stories from the
Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands
(Public Affairs; $26); author Robert Satloff
is executive director of the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy.

In The Years of Extermination: Nazi
Germany and the Jews 1939-1945
(HarperCollins Publishers; $39.95), Saul
Friedlander, a history professor at UCLA,
creates a comprehensive study of the
Holocaust using historical records and
research, as well as first-person narratives
of survivors; he concludes that German
extermination policies and measures
depended on the cooperation of local
authorities, the assistance of police forces
and the passivity of the population, primar-
ily of their political and spiritual elites.

A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the
Missing Agents of WWII (Doubleday;
$27.50) reads like a spy thriller as Sara
Helm reveals the details of British special
operations behind the French front lines.

Gotz Aly describes monetary rewards that
bolstered German compliance with Nazi
atrocities in Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder,
Racial War and the Nazi Welfare State
(Metropolitan Books; $32.50).

In Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After
Auschwitz (Random House; $25.95),
author Jan T. Gross investigates the bloodi-
est peacetime pogrom in 20th century
Europe — on July, 4,1946 — in the Polish
town of Kielce.

The philosophy of scholar Hannah Arendt,
developed as a result of the Holocaust, is