Microreviews 6 and 7 (2025)

 

Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 and some recently read books.

While I was poorly I made an effort to read some of the physical books that I had piled up around the house and with January 27th being the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz it seemed fitting that two of the books were about the Holocaust.

Last year when I posted about the 20 books that had stayed with me the most since reading two of this list were books about the Holocaust and I did write my MA dissertation on the way that it is portrayed in children's literature so it should be no surprise at all that I had books waiting on my TBR that covered this topic.

The first one I read was Other People's Houses by Lore Segal (Sort of Books)

This is a fictionalised autobiography covering her life in Vienna pre-1938 and then her childhood in Britain after she was one of the children evacuated on the Kindertransport. It was a fascinating read because even though it was a novel it was so detailed and personal that it could be mistaken for autobiography.  Segal explains this choice in her afterword explaining that while what she writes feels like her truth she knows that this isn't the case as historical facts don't line up with her memories and so to avoid complaints writing it in a fictional way let her tell her story as she saw it.

Segal was lucky in that her parents did also manage to escape Vienna and come to the UK (although due to a quirk in the system they were not allowed to live with Lore) but the feelings and issues that this caused are also covered in the book. Segal doesn't always come across in the best light but again this adds to the accurate feel of the book.

I Seek a Kind Person by Julian Borger (John Murray)

Like Segal's book this also is about Jewish children who left Vienna in 1938/39 but rather than coming on the official Kidnertransport the children featured here came via adverts placed in the Manchester Guardian - desperate parents pleading with British people to foster their children.

The book is centred on Borger's father, who was one of these children and who sadly committed suicide in the 1980s - as Borger says, the reach of the Holocaust didn't end with the liberation of the Camps in 1945. We learn much more about life in Vienna before the war and then about the means and methods that people did escape Austria before war broke out.

This book is more scholarly and impersonal than Segal's account but they compliment each other perfectly and this one shows that even though Other People's Houses is all from memory Segal's memories were accurate and although each journey was different there were incredible similarities in all of the evacuees stories.

Neither book made easy reading, but there is (dark) humour in them both and even though I have read other books about Kindertransport experiences I learned new things from each book and in the challenging times we are currently living in it seems important to read and remember what happened 80 years ago in the hope that it can't happen again.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

 

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank (Souvenir Press)

I'm not sure where I saw the first mention of this book but I was very pleased that I'd ordered it and that it arrived in time to read on Holocaust Memorial Day.

I've read many books set in Greece just before and during the second world war, and a couple have touched on the Jewish experiences but in the main they have been about daily Greek life.

This book tells the story of Stella Levi as she talks about her life to the author  (Frank) on Saturday mornings across a few years and it was incredible from page one.

Stella and her community were Sephardic Jews who had made Rhodes their home after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the sixteenth century. Unlike many European Jewish communities they spoke a version of Spanish rather than Yiddish and in many ways their way of life hadn't changed in that time.

The various rulers of Rhodes over the centuries have all left their mark on the community and by the 1930s the community was slowly modernising. Many of the young were emigrating for better lives in America, Palestine and the Congo, and those that remained were under the control of the Italians who ruled the Dodecanese from 1912. The young people were receiving a Western European education and able to speak Italian and French along with Judeo-Spanish, and assimilating this into their lives, along with the influence of the old Ottoman empire.

When the Italians surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Germans took control of Rhodes, and at first life didn't change too much for the 1700 occupants of the Juderia but then in 1944 all of them were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz.

Stella's story is fascinating and moving throughout and the style of the book - short chapters covering different topics - added to the way I responded to it hugely. Frank asks questions of Stella that she isn't always comfortable with answering instantly but she often comes back to them later - in a natural way that speaks of the friendship she has with him and that deepens your connection with the story. 

The other thing that really struck me about the book was Stella trying to balance her memories with hindsight and create a complete picture of her life. Frank is at times incredulous of the naivety of the community and it is wonderful how Stella stands her ground and can explain the different feelings of before/during and then what you can say knowing how everything did take place.

The book doesn't spend a huge amount of time talking about Stella's experiences actually in the camps - she herself has never wanted to be a person who only exists as a Holocaust survivor - but being able to speak French and Italian (and not Yiddish) had a huge influence on how Stella and her immediate group of friends survived until liberation. Their experiences in immediate aftermath of the war was also a new aspect of holocaust history for me as they were liberated in the west by American GIs rather than in the East by Russian soldiers.

I've been luck enough to visit Rhodes four times and yet I wasn't aware of this unique history, and I don't recall seeing the memorials (or the museum) dedicated to the Jewish history of the island. It won't be this year that we go back to Rhodes but when we do I'll definitely be searching out the area and putting pictures to the words. More about the area can be found here: https://jewishrhodes.org/la-juderia/

  

Micro Review 50 (Holocaust Memorial Day)

 

Maman, What Are We Called Now? by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar, trans. Francine Yorke (Persephone Books)

This volume from Persephone Press has been sitting on my shelf for a while but it has been worth the wait.

The titles of the book comes from the author's daughter as the family were French Jewish and in hiding during WW2, although unlike so many they were hiding more or less in plain sight and together for a lot of the war. The first part of the book covers the last 5 weeks of the German occupation of France and comes in the form of Mesnil-Amar's diary from these weeks - starting when her husband is arrested and put on the last transport from France to the East, and the Concentration/Death camps.

The excitement (and fear) caused by the approach of the Allied Armies on Paris is heightened by fear for Andre and this is all pored out into the diary entries, along with some reflection on the past decade. It was very interesting to get an eye witness account from inside Paris as the German's left, and also a reminder that whatever the victors would like you to believe not everyone suffered under the occupation and that although there were plenty of brave people not everyone was in the Resistance...

The diary is a breathless read, but for me the book becomes even more interesting in the final part where Mesnil-Amar's reflections on what came next for the displaced Jews of Europe, and the children who had been successfully hidden but now had no surviving family. Her meditations on how deluded French Jews had become before 1940 are also fascinating. 

I've read many books set in WW2, and many books with the Shoah as the main theme, but I think this is an excellent addition to my personal canon. I don't think I've read a book, by a survivor, that covers the before, during, and after in such a clear sighted way.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

 

After the War by Tom Palmer (Barrington Stoke)

Borrowed as a physical copy from Norfolk Libraries

The regular reader (hi Upstartwren!) will remember that this book made it in to my top reads of last year, however due to the topic of the book I thought I'd save my review for January, and Holocaust Memorial Day.

This fiction book retells a true story about the Holocaust that until recently wasn't well known in the UK:

Summer 1945. The Second World War is finally over and Yossi, Leo and Mordecai are among three hundred children who arrive in the English Lake District. Having survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, they’ve finally reached a place of safety and peace, where they can hopefully begin to recover.

But Yossi is haunted by thoughts of his missing father and disturbed by terrible nightmares. As he waits desperately for news from home, he fears that Mordecai and Leo – the closest thing to family he has left – will move on without him. Will life by the beautiful Lake Windermere be enough to bring hope back into all their lives?

What is so special about this book (beyond the incredible true story) is the way that Palmer has written it, Barrington Stoke produce books that are designed to be accessible to reluctant or dyslexic readers and to fit into this brief I think Palmer has pulled off an incredible feat.

The story doesn't soft soap the war, the Holocaust or the aftermath of the war in anyway, but the way that it is written means that it isn't overwhelming. The chapters are short and broken up with the incredible illustrations of Violet Tobacco and this had a bigger far impact on me (as neither dyslexic nor reluctant) than many of the other books on the topic I've read.

The story isn't couched in allegory, these are real boys who've experienced one of the worst events of the 20th Century and we learn all about this without euphemism or needing to know the history to understand what has happened to them. For me the starkest illustration of this is when Yossi is describing his family's arrival at Auschwitz. It is not left with Yossi and his father being separated from the rest of the family and never seeing them again. Palmer explains what happens, and how parents made the decisions they had to, there's no way that it can be misread or made 'nicer' by obscuring the events in vague language or with a need for prior knowledge. 

(As an aside the book that really left me confused as a young reader was The Final Journey by Gudrun Pausewang (trans. Crampton) which ended in a communal shower after a train journey across Europe. I know that the first time I read this I didn't understand why they were so happy/surprised when water came out of the shower heads.)

While the book is written in an accessible way, the subject is so well handled that a reluctant high school reader wouldn't feel like they were being given a book for a younger age group, and for the younger readers the length and style makes it a good story to back up other learning.

My first MA dissertation was about the Holocaust as portrayed in children's book and I wish that this book had been around at that time as it would have made a great contrast to some of the books I looked at.

Tom Palmer has a great website full of resources to support this book, including information about the real children who arrived in the Lake District from the concentration camps during the summer of 1945.

(Conversations I've had with Tom Palmer on Twitter have let me know that his next book is going to be set on HMS Belfast during WW2 - a book that I will have a special interest in as my paternal grandfather served on her, sadly not during the period Tom is writing about but I still can't wait to read more about life on the ship)

Legacy of Hope

Holocaust Memorial Day 2010



Blogging about something like Genocide is virtually impossible, but at the same time Holocaust Memorial Day should not go unmentioned.

January 27th has been picked as HMD for it marks the day that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and 2010 marks the 65th anniversary of this action. Sadly this act didn't see the end to genocide and countless millions have died since.

There are many books, fact and fiction written about the Jewish Holocaust. Many have been written for children, in fact I studied many of them in the course of writing the dissertation for my M.A. Not all of them are good but the important thing is that they are there. Hopefully if such actions aren't brushed under the carpet they will occur less and less. What we must not do is pretend such things never happen.

First They Came - Pastor Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialist
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me