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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Wendy Holden
Genre : Nonfiction
In recent years, I’ve read a number of books about women’s and men’s experiences in extermination camps set up during World War II. When I lived in Germany for a while many years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Dachau—the most sobering experience of my time in that country.
Wendy Holden has chronicled the stories of three married young women, among many others who were separated from their husbands and sent to Auschwitz II-Birkenau in 1944. They each find herself pregnant, and by chance conceal their condition from the one person who could send them to the gas chamber. These stories of unimaginable hardship and miracles continue as they as then sent to a Nazi-slave labor camp, where they are half-starved and almost worked to death. They then survive a 17-day train journey to Mauthausen in Austria and give birth to their three-pound babies under ghastly conditions—not knowing each other at the time.
This is an amazing, sickening, and also miraculous tale of perseverance against all odds.
You will never think of the prison and labor camps the same.
“Think only of beautiful things,” her husband told her just before they were separated on the ramp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It has worked. Hanka had arrived, and to her mother she seemed almost perfect. Conceived in love in an apartment in Bratislava by an adoring couple who’d lost so much, the tiny thing in her arms had survived Nazi occupation, the rigors of Auschqitz, the bitterest of winters, and dis months’ noise, violence, starvation and hard labor to push her way into war-torn Europe. “It was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,” Pristka said of the little bag of bones covered with skin. “We had been through so much and yet here we were, alive!”
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