A Rep Reading

A holocaust memoir from a diary kept by a young girl hiding in a bunker for 18 months during the worst of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Most interesting is the snapshot of the community of Zolkiew, Poland, one of the most welcoming communities for Jews in Eastern Europe. How the population of Jews in Zoliew went from 50,000 to about 50, and the author's own immediate family of 50 was reduced to 8 is horrendous. That a group of 18 Jews were protected by a known antisemitic man who's wife was a maid for Jewish families is remarkable, too. Clara was urged by her mother to chronicle their experience so people would know what happened to them if they were discovered and murdered. It is a gripping tale of sacrifice and courage by those hiding and the family that protected them in the face of such unprecedented terror. In the end, the devastation of the Jews of Zolkiew meant losing everything, including their homeland, when after the war was over they had nothing left to keep them there. An epilogue describes what happened immediately after the war and beyond, telling a heartbreaking tale of man's inhumanity to this vast network of Jewish families that were forsaken by their own Polish neighbors, occupying Germans and liberating Russians.