Overview
This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer's diary from her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people.Clara Kramer was a typical Polish Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara's family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsch (ethnically German) family from their town. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. His wife had worked as Clara's family's housekeeper. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families.
In all, eighteen people lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks' basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she was in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life, from the house's catching fire to Beck's affair with Clara's neighbor; the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp.Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent collection of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Editorial Reviews
Daily Telegraph (London)
“A superlative memoir of survival. . . . Few wartime memoirs convey with
such harrowing immediacy the evil of the Nazi genocide. . . . Her book
is a model documentary.”
John Clare
“Utterly compelling. At times, the tension is as high as in any thriller designed to stop your heart.”
Publishers Weekly
Polish-born Kramer, president of the Holocaust Resource Foundation at
Kean University, was a teenager when her family and others hid from the
Nazis in a secret bunker, rescued by a former housekeeper and her
husband, a reputed drunken anti-Semite who turned out to be an avenging
angel. Kramer's extensive recollections range from a liaison that
threatened the household and daily squabbles in the tomblike underground
quarters where food was scarce to their fear of discovery by the Nazis
and the shock and desperation of learning about relatives and friends
who had been killed. Her sister was sold out by a neighbor boy for a few
liters of vodka. This vividly detailed and taut narrative is a fitting
tribute to the bravery of victims and righteous gentiles alike. 8 pages
of b&w photos. (Apr. 21)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Library Journal
Based on her wartime diary, which she kept while hiding in a basement
in Poland, Kramer's book vividly recalls the tensions within her hidden
community after the Nazis overtook the town of Zolkiew in 1942. Of
particular interest are revelations about the family who hid the
Kramers, particularly how an anti-Semitic Polish householder
demonstrated great courage in shielding Jews in his basement. Kramer, in
her eighties, now lives in New Jersey.—Frederic Krome
Kirkus Reviews
Besieged Jews are saved by the most unlikely of heroes in Kramer's
Holocaust memoir. The author was 12 in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact
divided up Poland and the Soviets marched into her hometown of Zolkiew,
near Lvov. Her loving, comfortable family was soon broken up by the
brutal NKVD, which arrested her grandfather and all other former Polish
officers. He probably died in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of
the Soviet Union in 1941, which ended the pact and brought even more
terrible times to Zolkiew. Abetted by native Poles and Ukrainians, the
Wehrmacht, the SS and the Gestapo rousted the town's Jews from their
homes, deported and murdered them. Her desperate father and two
neighbors built a crawl space under one of their houses, but then all
Jews were ordered to relocate to the ghetto, which they knew meant
certain death. Astonishingly, a man named Beck, a Pole who was an ethnic
German-as well as a vocal anti-Semite, an adulterer and a drunk-agreed
to help them. He requested the home with the crawl space (the Nazis
allotted fellow Aryans the property of displaced Jews), spread a rumor
that they had fled and hid the beset, disoriented families beneath the
floor of the little house. Cramped and crowded, the grimy bunker was
just four-feet high until someone dug a hole in which to stand erect.
Among the rules-no talking, no complaining. In their burrow, they could
hear boots, gunfire, shouted orders and last cries. They heard the
trainmen and German soldiers billeted in the rooms above them.
Throughout all this, Beck, often with a bottle in his hand, was constant
and kind, providing food and protection for a year and a half. Kramer's
sister did not survive. Neither did 99 outof every 100 Jews in Zolkiew.
But this surprisingly honorable, truly righteous man saved Kramer and
17 others. The number 18, it should be noted, signifies "life" in the
Jewish tradition. Lucidly told with deeply etched personality sketches,
thanks to the author's use of her teenage diary, now in the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum. New York regional author appearances. Agent:
Susanna Lea/Susanna Lea Associates
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