A Cat Called Adolf

by Trude Levi

This is one holocaust memoir which does not stop at survival but goes on to describe the lasting effects upon those survivors of their persecution, betrayal and suffering. Trude Levi was inspired to set down her memories of her experiences as a young Hungarian girl deported to Buchenwald to work like a slave in a munitions factory. She says she had no sense of survival but was sustained by a strong sense of self-respect and a stubborn refusal to compromise. On her twenty-first birthday she collapsed from exhaustion on an infamous Death March and was left lying where she fell, not even worth a bullet. So, when the war ended shortly afterwards, she had survived - just. Years of wandering, poverty and hardship followed. Illness, disillusion and the insensitivity of others too their toll, yet the author is able to describe her experiences with directness and without self-pity. Her most fervent wish in telling her story is that the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten, and that the events she recorded are never allowed to happen again.

168 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had a day where I could have done nothing but read I would have finished this book in no time at all. It was very difficult to put down and when I was forced to set it aside to get on with my day I found myself constantly thinking about what I had read and at night I would lay awake for a whole new reason. After reading her story, Trude Levi has left a lasting impression in my mind, a woman that one could only aspire to learn strength.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trude Levi (Nee Mosonyi) relates her life before Auschwitz as a young girl growing up in Szombathely, 'the most anti-semitic town in Hungary, going on to her experiences at school during therise of anti-Semitism in her hungary, the horrors of Auschwitz, how she survived after she collapsed from exhaustion, on a death march, after the Nazis decided she was 'not worth a bullet'.
she go's on to describe her life after the holocaust, as a refugee in France, and her marriage to the schizophrenic musician Stephan Deak, and her life in
Durban, Israel and finally London, with her son Ilan.
Levi describes her life in all these places, describing the locations with accurate descriptive skill.
She describes her years of loneliness, with her husband in sanatoria, and her difficulty in dealing with his insanity, her work as a teacher, a librarian and a mother, and her later trials and tribulations.
An interesting account, because it tells of the life of a holocaust survivor, after her liberation from the camps, and how she survived through the decades.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book as she talks about how the Holocaust has affected her life long after it has ended.