Eva Grossman

The author, as a teenager, survived a couple of ghettos in Slovakia and Hungary and eventually went into hiding with her parents, sister, brother and cousin. They were kept by a Slovak woman and her daughter (both of whom have been honored as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem). Eight people stayed in a one-room cottage, and only four of them officially existed and had identity papers, and two of those sets of papers were forgeries. It was a nerve-racking existence for everybody and fortunately it happened towards the end of the war, so they didn't have to maintain their double life for more than a year or so. After liberation, the author's family stayed in Slovakia for several years and then emigrated -- her cousin wound up in England, her father in Israel and the rest went to the United States.

This memoir is not very detailed -- the author admits to huge, inexplicable gaps in her memory -- and a person who hasn't read very many Holocaust books would probably be disappointed by its lack of a good picture of the author's war experiences. I think it's more valuable for the beginning part, giving the history of anti-Semitism in Slovakia and detailing the rise of Nazism there, and the ending, describing the Yad Vashem ceremony honoring the rescuers (the first such description I've seen) and author's reluctant return to the country in the 1990s. There isn't a whole lot of literature out there on the Holocaust in Slovakia, so the book is worth reading just for that.… (más)