Signs Of Survival: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Renee Hartman with Joshua M Greene

In Signs of Survival, Renee and Herta relate their harrowing experience of living through the Holocaust and their lives afterwards. Their story is told in alternating first person narration.

Renee was born in 1933, her sister Herta in 1935. Herta writes that there were several generations of deaf people in their family including their parents, Julius and Henrietta. To communicate, they used sign language. Their parents attended the Vienna School for the Deaf: their father was a master jeweller and their mother a dressmaker.

Renee and Herta grew up in Bratislava, a city in the Nazi-occupied Slovak Republic. Fifteen thousand Jews lived in Bratislava at this time. Jews living in Bratislava's wealthier areas were forced to move into the poorer, Old Town area. Renee and Herta's family lived in a fourth floor apartment. Because the Nazis would not allow Jewish children to attend school, Renee did not begin her formal education until after the war. 

The family soon moved to Brno where there was a large Jewish community. They eventually returned to Bratislava but soon the situation in the city began to worsen with Nazi soldiers beating Jewish citizens. Then they were forced to wear the yellow Star of David on their outer clothing.

By 1941, Renee and her family had six extra people living with them in their apartment as the Nazis the Jewish population into the Old Town. She remembers seeing the "transports" where Jews were forced from their homes into transport trucks and taken to "resettlement camps' which they later learned were actually concentration camps to murder them. Because Renee was able to hear, she would listen for the Nazi soldiers and sign to her family that they needed to hide.

In 1943, Renee and Herta were sent by their parents to live on a farm of friends who were also deaf. Their farm was located in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains and they agreed to take the girls only if they were paid a large sum every month. The girls would receive one surprise visit from their father, after that they never saw him again.

When the farm couple did not receive money for over five months they told their girls they could no longer stay and they drove them back to Bratislava and left them on the street. They realized there were almost no Jews left in the city. Alone and unable to locate their parents, the girls lived on the streets for weeks before they finally turned themselves into the police. So would begin their haunting journey into the depths of the Holocaust. 

Fortunately, Renee and Herta survived the Holocaust and came to live a long productive life in America.

Discussion

Signs of Survival is a Holocaust memoir geared towards younger readers and is perfect for introducing them to this difficult topic. It is a witness account of the experiences of two sisters, Renee and Herta Hartmann who lived in Slovakia during the Nazi occupation, their time in the infamous concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen and their life afterwards in America. In this way it offers readers  through eye-witness testimony, the real life experience of the Holocaust as well as their life in the decades afterwards. At this time, while Renee is still living in the United States, Herta passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty-seven.

Renee and Herta do not go into explicit detail about some of the evils of the Holocaust (for example the Slovakian citizens beating their Jewish neighbours, the transports, and life in the concentration camp) but provide enough details that younger readers will understand what happened. This is done in an easy reading style with both Renee and Herta offering their accounts, and done in short chapters. Their account shows two very young children caught up in a situation that forced them to fend for themselves with Renee being the ears for Herta, ensuring that the two sisters remained together even through the worst of situations, from starving on the streets of Bratislava, to suffering through typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

At the back, the author has included an Epilogue about the Holocaust and a section of photographs of the sisters and their families. A map showing the countries of Nazi Europe during World War II would be helpful for readers.  Signs of Survival, the title a play on the use of sign language used by Renee and Herta to communicate and to keep Herta especially safe, is highly recommended for middle grade readers.

Book Details:

Signs of Survival: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Renee Hartman with Joshua M. Greene
New York: Scholastic Press    2021
123 pp.

They Went Left by Monica Hesse

They Went Left is Monica Hesse's newest offering. This novel focuses on the post-World War II period as a holocaust survivor, eighteen-year-old Zofia Lederman, searches among the ruins of Europe for her missing twelve-year-old brother.

It is August 1945 and Zofia is preparing to leave the camp where she has been for the last few months regaining her health. Zofia was barely alive in Gross-Rosen when it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in February. She was found in the women's barracks by Dima Sokolov, a Russian soldier. Now Dima waits for her to be processed out of the camp so he can drive her to Sosnowiec, her home town. Zofia hopes that her twelve-year-old brother, Abek who was in Birkenau which was liberated before Gross-Rosen, will have returned there.

Zofia remembers how they became separated. Three years into the occupation of Sosnowiec, on August 12, 1942, all the remaining Jews were ordered to go to the soccer stadium under the pretense of being issued new identification. But when Zofia and her family arrived at the stadium, they like other Jews waited for days to be sorted by health, age and by who looked strong enough to work. Eventually, Zofia's family was sorted, she and Abek were sent to the right. Everyone else in her family, "Papa, Mama, Baba Rose, beautiful Aunt Maja.....they went left."

Her experiences at Birkenau and Gross-Rosen have left her struggling to remember and to distinguish real memories from dreams.

With Dima's help, Zofia returns to her family's apartment in Sosnowiec, their real home before the Nazis forced all six of them into an apartment in the Jewish ghetto. While Dima goes to report in to his superiors, Zofia walks to her family's home on Mariacka Street. She finds their apartment empty, no furniture and no Abek. A neighbour, Pani Wojcik tells Zofia she hasn't seen him. In a closet, Zofia finds a hope chest filled with clothing they couldn't take with them when they were forced to leave home and into the ghetto. In it she finds her mother's wedding dress along with clothing that Zofia had made for her brother or aunt. In her brother's jacket, she had sewed in the story of their family in the form of the alphabet. "A is for Abek. B is for Baba Rose. C is for Chomicki & Lederman, the factory we own, and Dis for Dekerta, the street we attend synagogue on,....H is for our mother, Helena; M is for Aunt Maja; Z is for Zofia."

Dima arrives at the apartment telling Zofia that he has invited his Commander for dinner. When Zofia goes to the bakery to buy bread, she meets a friend, Gosia who survived the war in hiding. Gosia tries to help Zofia locate her brother by asking Salomon Prager who survived and who may have seen Abek. Dima, Commander Kuznetsov, and Gosia have dinner at Zofia's apartment. During the dinner Zofia learns that Abek may have been transferred to either Bergen-Belsen or Dachau which are near Munich. She also learns that Dima has learned that Abek is not at Bergen-Belsen but he doesn't know about Dachau or Birkenau. Zofia is told that if Abek was evacuated from Birkenau he is likely to be in a refugee camp called Foehrenwald near Munich. When Dima comes to stay overnight in order to protect Zofia, she quietly leaves after he falls asleep and takes a train from Silesia to Germany. 

So begins Zofia's hunt for her brother. It will take her deep into Germany to a displaced persons camp in Munich where Zofia will finally confront her past so she can face the future.

Discussion

They Went Left is a heart-rending story of a Holocaust survivor confronting the past she has blocked out to protect herself as she struggles to reclaim her life at the end of World War II.

Hesse, who has written several World War II historical fiction novels, wanted to write a story that focused on the post-war period. "I realized that most of the books I'd read and documentaries I'd seen all finished at the same place: the end of the war. They ended with the liberation of a concentration camp. The disbanding of an army unit. A celebration in the streets. There was much less about what happened in the weeks and months after the war, when an entire continent had to find a way to recover from the suffering it had experienced and the atrocities it had committed." 

 

On a trip through Europe and specifically on a train ride through a city called Sosnowiec, Hesse was inspired "...to re-create, as best I could, what might have happened to a young woman who had been taken from that town at the beginning of the war, and who now had to return to it."  In her "A Note on History and Research" Hesse takes readers through her stages of research and how she attempted to recreate some of the historical points in her story. For example, Zofia's imprisonment was patterned from the historical event of young women with sewing skills being sent as slave labour to Neustadt, a textile factory, and then forced to march to Gross-Rosen in the winter near the end of the war in Europe.

The result is a novel that not only provides readers with a window into postwar Europe, but also to the challenges Jews who survived the Holocaust encountered. Most had lost almost all immediate family.  Few children survived the war, as most were gassed or brutally murdered as Zofia witnessed. Many survivors suffered from serious physical ailments like Zofia who lost toes to frostbite. Some survived only to die a few days, weeks or months after, as in the case of Miriam's twin sister Rose. Most had no homes to return to, either being destroyed in the war or repossessed by neighbours or strangers who refused to leave. Attitudes in many European countries towards the Jewish population continued to be hostile, as demonstrated by the threats Zofia received while staying at her family's home in Sosnowiec. As a result, many like Breine and Chaim, emigrated to Israel while others like Zofia and Abek moved to North America. In this way, Hesse has effectively captured an accurate snapshot of postwar Europe for young readers, making this historical fiction at its best.

In They Went Left, the story opens with Zofia Lederman leaving the hospital to begin the search for her brother, Abek. With the help of two Russian soldiers, Zofia follows a lead that takes her to a displaced persons camp, Foehrenwald, near Munich. Throughout this time, Zofia seems confused, unable to concentrate, mixing up names and forgetting events that have just happened. And she continues to have dreams about her missing brother.

Hesse gives hints that something about Zofia's memories is not quite right through a series of dreams Zofia experiences, about the last time she saw Abek. The novel opens with the first version of the dream in which Abek is a healthy boy and she is about to be transferred out of Birkenau. "But then something changes. Then dream-Abek's face twists, and his words come out pained: 'Something happened,' this Abek says. 'But we don't have to talk about it yet.' " This suggests that something about this memory or dream is not quite as it seems and that it is something Zofia is unable to cope with at this time. Each dream Zofia has is not quite a true recounting of what actually happened to Zofia and Abek as they are forced from Sosnowiec and travel to Birkenau. They are what she terms, "A dream version, not the real version, and as soon as I realize that, I open my eyes."  

Eventually Zofia has a dream that places her and Abek in a dark space. He tells her 

" 'Is it time yet?' he asks. 'Is it time to think about the last time you saw me?'

'I'm trying,' I tell him, 'I'm trying.'

'You're getting closer,' he says, 'You're getting closer, so please make a promise to me, Zofia. Make one guarantee: that this is the last time you lie about the last time you saw me.'

'How can it be a lie if I don't know what the truth is?' I ask.

'The absences of the truth is not the presence of a lie. I'm trying. I'm trying. I'm trying. '"

By this time it's evident that Zofia is suppressing something so terrible she mustn't remember it.

When she arrives in Foehrenwald to search for her brother, the kindness of the refugees helps Zofia and her mental state improves. She begins a relationship with a man named Josef Meuller and she rediscovers her skill for sewing and tailoring as her family once owned a clothing factory. She takes a trip to the Kloster Indersdorf, a camp that took in children from Dachau to see if Abek is there but this proves fruitless. The kindly nun, Sister Therese who runs the camp, offers to post notices and shortly afterwards, Abek shows up at Foehrenwald. It seems unbelievable.

 

But soon Zofia comes to the realization that the boy claiming to be her brother is not her brother. This and the realization of Josef's true identity force Zofia to confront what really happened in the train to Abek at Birkenau. This memory had been suppressed so she could survive through the horror of each day. "I left pieces of myself in that car. I left pieces I will never get back. I left them unwillingly, as my mind forced itself to block away those impossible, impossible minutes. I left them willingly for my own protection, because remembering that story would have demolished every reason I had to survive. And beyond all reason, beyond any possible explanation, I still did want to survive."

Although Abek was gone, his story lived on in the jacket that Zofia had made for him containing the alphabet of their lives. It was found by another little boy who also wanted to survive and who losing his family hoped to find another. But that alphabet which told the story of Zofia and her family is no more. Now it has changed.

"A is for Abek.

B is for Baba Rose. No. B isn't for Baba Rose any longer. Baba Rose is gone. B is for -- B can be for Breine, effervescent and hopeful, planning her beautiful wedding inside a refugee camp. And C is for Chaim, her timid Hungarian groom.

D is for Dima, who saved me, take me to the hospital and then taking me home to Sosnowiec. 

E is for Esther, kind and steady, apply rouge to the cheeks of her protesting friend.....

X is to x things out. To cross out the things I'll forget on purpose. Some things are okay to forget on purpose....

Z is for Zofia."

 

Zofia, knowing that the boy before her is not Abek, makes a decision to look to the future. "I think we must find miracles where we can. We must love the people in front of us. We must forgive ourselves for the things we did to survive. The things we broke. The things that broke us." 

 

Well-written and well researched, They Went Left is story filled with tragedy and hope. In Zofia, Hesse has crafted a heroine who, despite having experienced the most unimaginable suffering and seen so much death, has survived. This trauma makes her an unreliable narrator for most of the novel. Eventually she is forced to confront the reality of what happened to her and to her family. Only when she is in a place of safety, when she experiences the kindness of others, and when she sees that there is the possibility of a life after the horrors of war, can Zofia being to process what she has experienced.

As one might expect this novel does contain some sexual content and some scenes of death and violence, making it more suitable for older readers.

Book Details:

They Went Left by Monica Hesse

New York: Little, Brown and Company    2020

364 pp.