0 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