Cordelia Edvardson was born in 1929 and raised in Berlin by her mother and grandmother. It was not an easy or happy childhood. Her relationship with her mother was difficult and from the age of twelve she did not live at home. Partially this was to protect her step-siblings from the perceived taint of her half-Jewish parentage. Although she was raised Catholic and her mother tried everything to keep her Jewish identity hidden (even having her be adopted by a Spanish couple so that Cordelia could have a Spanish passport), the Gestapo caught her. Cordelia was forced to either sign a paper saying she was Jewish and thus subject to the Nuremburg Laws or her mother would be prosecuted for hiding a Jew, which was treason.

In 1943 Cordelia was taken in a roundup and sent to Theresienstadt. She was fourteen-years-old. When she arrived, she was sent straight to prison for unknowingly having contraband and later released to the general camp. Less than a year later she was deported to Auschwitz where she was forced to labor in various factories. After liberation, she ended up in Sweden, where she became a citizen. Later she spent many years in Jerusalem as a Middle East correspondent for a Swedish newspaper.

Although quite short, this Holocaust memoir covers some themes and events that struck me as not typical. First, although Cordelia is young when most of the memoir takes place, this is not a coming of age story. It′s an adult′s clear-eyed perspective written in the concise language of a journalist. Second, there is no celebration of life after the war ends.

To put it behind her, to forget, to be healthy—the girl felt despair, rage, and hatred turning into a burning ball of fire in her throat. She still lacked words, but if she had had them, she would have screamed: ″But I don′t want it behind me, I don′t want to get healthy, I don′t want to forget! All you ever want to do is ′wipe the slate clean,′ as you all so complacently put it. You want to take my anguish from me, deny it and wipe it away and protect yourselves against my rage, but then you are wiping me our as well, ′eradicating′ me, as the Germans put it, then you deny me too, because I am all that...″

Cordelia struggles in her relationships and as a mother. Even Sweden galls her,

She, who still had a burnt smell in her hair and in her clothes, began to turn every stone and rummage through every heap of refuse, but all she found were some wood lice or the bones of birds. No skeletons marked by torture, no skulls showing evidence of gold teeth having been broken out of the jaw bones, no emaciated corpses of children.

In the midst of so much innocence she found it hard to breathe, and she realized she had to move on.

Cordelia ends up in Israel and, while reporting on the Yom Kippur War, finds acceptance and an odd sense of peace.

The threat of destruction and the people of the land looked each other in the eye with the familiarity of recognition. The survivors returned to the only form of life, the only task and challenge they had learned to master—the struggle for survival. But she felt, here human beings and the forces of destruction were meeting as combatants, the outcome was not predetermined, not this time. This was fair play.

I liked the tone of the memoir. Nothing is wrapped up with a pretty bow, the world is not let off the hook.

Her anger did not permit her to accept the pity and solicitude of others. They would have to try harder than that! She would not allow them to cry over her the way they had sobbed over Anne Frank′s diary…

With the touching letters to ″Kitty″ the world had received its catharsis at much too cheap a price—and pretty young actresses were being given a rewarding part to play on the stage and in the movies. The thought filled her with feelings of hatred.

Yet, Cordelia does find a place and a position that affords her self-respect and self-determination. She marries, has children. The memoir ends with a resounding, ″I am!″ ( )

A quali fantasie, a quali elaborati esorcismi può ricorrere una bambina che lotta inerme contro le potenze dello sterminio e della sopraffazione? Unica colpa di Cordelia è l'esser figlia illegittima di un ebreo; a nulla valgono gli sforzi della madre, scrittrice tedesca, non ebrea, per salvare la propria creatura dalla deportazione. Consapevole fin dai primi anni di vita del destino di esclusione e sofferenza che le sarà riservato, Cordelia lo accetta con l'orgoglio straziante del debole nei confronti del persecutore, della vittima

This Holocaust memoir is written differently from any other I've read. It's not in chronological order and a lot of times what's going on isn't really clear. It's a series of images, some of them foggy, some of them mixed up, from the author's childhood and adolescence. It's much more literary than a lot of Holocaust memoirs. Edvardson's mother was a novelist and according to the dust jacket, she herself has written other books.

Cordelia Edvardson was the illegitimate daughter of a married Jewish man and a half-Jewish mother. She never knew her father, but she had an Aryan stepfather and was raised Catholic. To protect her from the Nazis her mother had her adopted by some Spanish people so she could get a Spanish passport and be exempt from deportation, but eventually the ruse was discovered and, at fourteen or so, Cordelia was sent first to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. There she worked as a kind of secretary for Josef Mengele. After the war she moved to Sweden and married, then converted to Judaism and moved to Israel, where she lives today.

I would recommend this book to people who have read a lot about the Holocaust, but not to neophytes on the subject. People who don't already know what Cordelia's talking about will probably be confused and irritated by her vagueness. But I found it intriguing. ( )