David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "chechoslovakia"
ANITA'S PIANO
ANITA’S PIANO is an original Holocaust story told from a nine-year-old’s point of view (fourteen at the end). It also includes pictures of Anita and her family as well as such mundane information as a recipe or two.
At the beginning of the book, Anita lives in Czechoslovakia; Hitler is just about to claim the Sudetenland for Germany. Such well-known events as Kristallnacht begin to portend a cataclysmic future for Anita’s family; the requirement that all Jews wear a five-point yellow star occurs, and Anita is shocked that her old friends seem to be avoiding her.
Family history is intermixed with the above. Anita’s grandmother tells her about a suicide in the family. Anita (married name Schorr) has a little brother Michael whose spirits she attempts to keep up, even if she has to lie to do it.
Eventually Anita’s family must surrender their home; they’re moved to a ghetto where her father is mustered into the ghetto guard. They are given little food. As more people arrive, more of the original newcomers are moved, and that’s how Anita and her family arrive in Auschwitz.
Several other surprising anecdotes are included such as when Anita is waiting in line to be vaccinated for hepatitis by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. She begins to cry and a Nazi nurse takes pity on her and gives her cocoa.
Anita life is saved when her mother suggests she volunteer for a work detail. She’s supposed to be eighteen, but somehow she qualifies; the food gets better, and she meets a Wehrmacht lieutenant who gives her part of his sandwiches and lets her go swimming in the ocean. But she’s separated from her family and has no way of knowing what has happened to them.
Anita is a likable character; the reader really cares what will happen to her, but the book starts with her in a refugee camp, so we already know she survived the war. The only suspense is what happened to her father, mother, brother and the rest of the family.
Author Marion A. Stahl includes “historical highlights” at the end of the book, starting with the Sino-Japanese war in 1939, ending with the surrender of the German Army Group Center in Czechoslovakia in May of 1945.
At the beginning of the book, Anita lives in Czechoslovakia; Hitler is just about to claim the Sudetenland for Germany. Such well-known events as Kristallnacht begin to portend a cataclysmic future for Anita’s family; the requirement that all Jews wear a five-point yellow star occurs, and Anita is shocked that her old friends seem to be avoiding her.
Family history is intermixed with the above. Anita’s grandmother tells her about a suicide in the family. Anita (married name Schorr) has a little brother Michael whose spirits she attempts to keep up, even if she has to lie to do it.
Eventually Anita’s family must surrender their home; they’re moved to a ghetto where her father is mustered into the ghetto guard. They are given little food. As more people arrive, more of the original newcomers are moved, and that’s how Anita and her family arrive in Auschwitz.
Several other surprising anecdotes are included such as when Anita is waiting in line to be vaccinated for hepatitis by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. She begins to cry and a Nazi nurse takes pity on her and gives her cocoa.
Anita life is saved when her mother suggests she volunteer for a work detail. She’s supposed to be eighteen, but somehow she qualifies; the food gets better, and she meets a Wehrmacht lieutenant who gives her part of his sandwiches and lets her go swimming in the ocean. But she’s separated from her family and has no way of knowing what has happened to them.
Anita is a likable character; the reader really cares what will happen to her, but the book starts with her in a refugee camp, so we already know she survived the war. The only suspense is what happened to her father, mother, brother and the rest of the family.
Author Marion A. Stahl includes “historical highlights” at the end of the book, starting with the Sino-Japanese war in 1939, ending with the surrender of the German Army Group Center in Czechoslovakia in May of 1945.
