“MY REAL NAME IS HANNA,” BY TARA LYNN MASIH

Over many years, I have read numerous books on the Holocaust and for most of my life I have refused to visit Germany, Italy, and Japan because I felt that the atrocities those countries committed before and during World War 2 were unpardonable.

I have written about the Holocaust and have befriended a number of Holocaust survivors who were nice enough to tell me their painful stories.

Many people have asked me if I think I would have done anything different if I was a German soldier and my response has always been the same. “I would hope to God that I would have had at least the courage to put a gun to my head and kill myself before killing innocent women, children, and the elderly.”

It really bothered me that after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October, 7, 2023 that killed over 1300 hundred innocent civilians and took a couple of hundred hostages that once Israel responded with massive force, killing tens of thousands innocent Palestinians, the narrative suddenly changed and it was Israel who was committing genocide and being blamed for carrying out a Holocaust.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel terrible about what is happening to the innocent Palestinians, but to hear college students across our campuses protest the killing of the Palestinians and calling Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack genocidal and a Holocaust tells me that they are ignorant and need to take some history lessons on the Jewish Holocaust that killed over six million innocent Jews during World War 2 and the genocide of Jews throughout history dating back over two thousand years.

A week ago I wrote a review on John Boyne’s, “All the Broken Places,” that dealt with the culpability of a twelve year old German girl, whose father was the commander of one of the most notorious concentration camps during World War 2, who escaped to Paris before the allies could arrest her. I ended the review by writing, “that Mr. Boyne’s book is a reminder that to forget the lessons of history is as much a crime as a twelve year old girl witnessing these crimes and doing nothing.”

Ms. Maish’s historical novel, “My Real Name is Hanna,” is a powerfully told story about the Nazis’ genocide of one-and-a-half million Ukrainian Jews during the German invasion of that country. It is told through the eyes of a young Teenage girl name Hanna whose family and relatives have to leave their home in a small Ukrainian city and first hide out in a cabinet deep in the forest and finally for nearly a year live in a tunnel of caves further into the forest to escape the Germans and the Ukrainian non-Jews who cooperate with the Germans.

Hanna’s family, relatives and friends are traditional Jews who celebrate the holidays and practice their religion diligently but as their survival becomes more and more endangered, battling sickness and starvation, they need to compromise many of those traditions but never their morality and kindness toward their fellow human beings in dire situations.

Hanna is an unforgettable character but she is just one of many unforgettable, extremely well developed characters in this must read novel. Ms. Masih’s writing is not as descriptive as in a previous collection of wonderful short stories I read, but one nevertheless gets an haunting, memorable feeling for the forest and the deep dark tunnel of caves they are forced to hide in…not from the foxes or bears or owls but from the immoral and unethical German soldiers and their Ukrainian accomplices.

Another remarkable work from this amazingly talented writer.