Youth in Flames: A Teenager's Resistance and Her Fight for Survival in the Warsaw Ghetto

by Aliza Vitis-Shomron

We traveled in silence. We all parted from the life we had led there, in the city of our birth. I also said goodbye to the ruins of burned out houses, the place where I had spent my childhood, a time never to return. I left my weeping soul among those ruins, still issuing a terrible smell, as I parted from the courtyard in Ciepla Street No. 19, from my friends in the Movement and my youth leaders, Rut and Mira, my aunts and uncles, Tzameret, my teacher, Miriam, my friend—a huge graveyard of half a million of Poland’s Jews.

Wait for the avengers, for the day of reckoning, you damned ruins! Germany will never be able to atone for its responsibility for the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

“Aliza gives a powerful and detailed description of the horrors of the great deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto in the summer of 1942, which sentenced to death 85 percent of the population of 350,000 in Warsaw at the time. The episode of the family’s struggle for survival and search for a way of saving themselves reflects presence of mind, courage, and rare coincidences.”
—From the Foreword by Professor Israel Gutman, Holocaust survivor, historian, and author

Genres: Holocaust, Nonfiction, Memoir, World War II

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Aliza Melamed Vitis-Shomron remains just one of a handful of youth from the brave Hashomer Hatzair (the youth movement) who escaped just as the Nazis stormed the Warsaw Ghetto and executed everyone left. She was charged with telling the world about the horrors. This book fulfills her promise. She lives today in Israel, a Holocaust survivor with horrifying memories and a zest for life.