Judith Alter Kallman

I just finished reading A Candle in the Heart by Judith Alter Kallman. The book is not long but the content is quite rich. The story is about the author's life. That life starts out tragically. She's born in Czechoslovakia during its democratic interlude between the wars. She was born into a small community in modern Slovakia in the late 1930's. Jews had inhabited that small community for a few hundred years. The Jews never really mingled into the population and President Masaryk had to come a few times to calm down the surrounding populace. Still there was comfort in the close-knit families and Jewish community, a lot like the fictional "Anatefka" of Fiddler on the Roof.

Things obviously got incomparably worse after the Nazis dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1938, before the formal start of WW II. The Nazis, with the active assistance of the Hlinka Slovak thugs began deporting the Jews to concentration camps around 1941. The girl's parents were forced onto a train, and her father sternly told her to "live" and not attempt to board with them. Apparently he was murdered a few weeks later by the Nazis. The author and her remaining family made the brutal trek through the Slovak winter to Budapest, Hungary, where for a time the Jews were accorded some degree of respite from the Nazis. The author actually found refuge with a warm, loving couple. Unfortunately that came to a brutal end when Hitler decided that murdering more Jews trumped avoiding defeat in the war. The 700,000 Jews still in Hungary were a juicy target. Nevertheless, someone must have been watching, because she narrowly escaped murder at the hands of the Nazis after their takeover of Hungary in October 1944. She made it back through a series of orphanages in Slovakia, until an activist Rabbi brought her and other children to England in the famous "kindertransport." From England she made aliyah to Israel. Then she met her first husband and emigrated to the U.S.

I will save the rest, but "spoiler alert"; it's ending is almost fairy tale. A solid "five stars" on Goodreads.… (más)