“SURVIVING THE FOREST,” BY ADIVA GEFFEN.

 A couple of days ago I was looking at President Biden signing a cooperation agreement with Japan and  South Korea at Camp David. I turned to my wife, who knows her history, and asked, “How many Americans do you think know how significant this agreement is?”

She replied, “Maybe one percent.”

I agreed with her. It is often forgotten what the occupying Japanese did to the Korean people before and during World War 2 (not to mention what they did to the Chinese and the Philippine people). It could easily be called a Holocaust or genocide.

For a good part of my life, I refused to ever visit Germany, Japan, or Italy because of their crimes against humanity. I eventually dropped Italy from the list, mainly because they were fairly inept when it came to warfare, and partly because all my ancestors are Italian and they did not, from what I studied, participate in Mussolini’s dream.

Adiva Geffen’s book, “Surviving The Forest,” is about a beautiful and happy young woman named Sarah, but called, Shurka, and her family having to move from their village, where supposedly the Jews and Gentiles, got along beautifully…celebrating holidays and birthdays together into a neighboring Ghetto and then into the depths of a forest to survive against the Nazis (and also the Polish turncoats) desire to eliminate all Jews.

Shurka’s story is similar but unique like all stories about the Holocaust. It examines the inhumanity  that different races and religions can practice against other human beings…literally no different from them.

What makes Ms. Geffen’s story somewhat unique is that the story does not end with the end of the war but continues and examines the pogroms against Jews in Poland and elsewhere on the continent after the war…not nearly to the extent of what the Germans managed to do but they nevertheless existed.

Israel did not exist as a country until 1948 and the British who controlled the area, refused to let Jewish refugees into what is known today as the country of Israel. It is especially during this time that the pogroms against many of the Jewish people continued as they waited to travel and live either in America or Israel. Inhumanity has no boundaries, as we are now, once again, seeing here in the U.S.A.

Ms. Geffen lives in Israel and is regarded as one of the best writers in the country. “Surviving The Forest,”is her examination of the holocaust before, during, and after World War 2 and it is well worth reading.

I imagine if the Jewish and Korean people have managed to cooperate with the once brutal regimes of the Japanese and Germans anything is possible and surely preferable. But one should never forget history because that is when such brutality tends to repeat.