Kinderlager: An Oral History of Young Holocaust Survivors - Hardcover

Relaying the first-person stories of three women incarcerated in Auschwitz as children, Nieuwsma, a freelance journalist, has done an impressive job of capturing their voices and presenting coherent accounts of their experiences. The women?respectively ages six, seven and 10 upon liberation in 1945?describe how they survived the decimation of their Jewish community in the Polish town of Tomaszow Mazowiecki, endured the unimaginable conditions at Auschwitz and came to be placed in that concentration camp's Kinderlager, or children's camp. They also identify the hardships these early experiences created for them in their adult lives. Many of the episodes are horrific. One girl is marched off to die: "So we're going to the crematorium. Doesn't everyone go to the crematorium? Don't all Jews go to the crematorium?" (When the children are sent back, the girl explains to her mother that there'd been a mix-up, adding, "They'll take us next time.") However, the information is not mediated in any way for young readers?for example, there is only scanty framework established for the events, nor much attempt, implicit or otherwise, to help readers absorb the shocks. Many of the horrors are gratuitous, as in a news photo of an aunt lying murdered in a jewelry-store robbery, after the war. Nor are obvious questions posed (What was the Germans' rationale in creating a children's barracks within a death camp?). See Anita Lobel's recent No Pretty Pictures for a work at least as frank as this book but that nonetheless transcends the terrors of its subject. Ages 10-up.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Three Jewish American women from the same town in Poland describe what happened to them as children in the Holocaust. All three ended up in the Kinderlager, the children's section of the Auschwitz death camp. Nieuwsma draws on his in-depth interviews with them and lets each survivor tell it in her own voice. The organization is tight, in three separate sections, with none of the repetition and rambling of loose oral history, but the editorial presence is unobtrusive; each story reads like a memoir. Despite the title and the slightly large-size pages, this is not a book for children. The survivors speak with restraint, there is no sensationalism, but they witnessed atrocity, and they cannot forget it. They survived roundups, transports, selections, and massacre; they breathed the smoke of the chimneys, and they saw the child victims of Mengele's medical experiments "covered with bandages and curled up in pain." After their liberation, they returned to continuing anti-Semitism, even pogroms, in Poland. All three speak of the burden of their mothers' memories as well as their own. Their accounts combine the immediacy of the child's experience with the sophistication of adult hindsight. The occasional haunting family photographs document all that is lost, but contemporary photos show each survivor with her children and grandchildren. Like Anita Lobel in No Pretty Pictures , these women refuse to play celebrity or victim. Hazel Rochman