Hiding in Plain Sight: My Holocaust Story of Survival

by Beatrice Sonders, David Salama (Introduction)

After decades of concealing the full account of her experiences, Holocaust survivor Beatrice Sonders (Basia Gadzuik) writes her story of survival and courage in the face of the ultimate horrors.

Born in 1924 and growing up in the small town of David-Horodok, a village in eastern Poland, Basia spent her childhood surrounded by family, traditions, and a Jewish education that rebirthed the Hebrew language. But when the Germans and Ukrainians obliterated David-Horodok in 1941, killing off all Jewish men in the town, everything changed.

Left to fend for themselves, Basia and her mother fled 100 kilometers south, driven into the infamous Sarny ghetto. Tragedy struck again as the Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1942, and Basia went into the first of many hiding places. After years of running from soldiers, changing her identity, and hiding her faith, Basia emerged as a survivor – shepherding the rebirth of her faith and her family in America.

Genres: Holocaust, History, Memoir, World War II, Nonfiction, Biography, Novella

120 pages, Paperback

First published June 22, 2018

Reviews

[StarryEyes]

So sad

This book was sad the pain losing your family to people who just hated your kind because you are Jewish.
Crazy . All the fear and heart ship a young girl endure alone threw that nightmare trying to survive.
I can’t even think of what I could do in a scary but true situation as she did.

[Cindy]

I've read many books like this, but this is the worst one of them all. I intend to delete it. The author is Jewish of course, but she comes across as having a bad attitude. It seems like all she's interested in is money once in America. Sorry, I just didn't like it at all and wouldn't recommend it.

[Dr.J.G.]

The book is from compilation of transcripts of interviews that the author's grandmother gave to various people and organisations, including some ten hours of interviews with the author over several days in 2016.

"“In every generation, each person is obligated to view for themselves as if they had been there and left Egypt.”

"In other words, we are required to put ourselves in the Exodus narrative and try to imagine that we, as individuals, were witnesses to the slavery of our people and their eventual deliverance out of Egypt to the promised land of Israel. The following memoir entailed a long, complex process, but I like to think that the words in this memoir of the matriarch of my family serve as our own sort of Haggadah. While it’s a telling of a story not two-thousand years old, but a mere seventy-five years old, because of my grandmother’s survival, we are here today. Because of her, we are a family bound by our connection to this remarkable story of hope, luck, and faith."

"To find more answers, I contacted the International Tracing Service and found documents of my grandmother’s time in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany after the war. I also came across her listing on the ship manifest when she and her family came to America in 1949 and dug into the family tree, coming across cousins from both Bea’s maternal and paternal lineage. Perhaps most interestingly, I discovered that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ida Rosenblum, who is only six months younger than she is, lives in the building next door to her. Due to a family misunderstanding, they did not know each other, despite raising their families less than a mile from one another. I think, therefore, that it is important to recognize the deep wounds the Holocaust created and that, even seventy-five years later, some of these small fragments of shattered families are only now being pieced back together.

"In August of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to David-Horodok, which is in present-day Belarus, with the David-Horodok organization of Detroit. Together, with other David-Horodok descendants from Detroit and Israel, we walked the cobblestone streets of the town that was once a thriving Jewish community. I found the street on which my grandmother’s house once stood. We walked the seven kilometers to the mass grave where Bea’s brother and father most likely remain, and later journeyed to Sarny, which is today across the border in the Ukraine. Grandma and her mother walked this 100-kilometer journey together in August of 1941.

"There, on the outskirts of town, are three large mounds of earth—the three mass graves in which nearly 18,000 Jews were murdered during the liquidation of the Sarny ghetto. This is the resting place of Bea’s mother. Seeing these locations firsthand was a moving and emotional experience and motivated me further to help complete my grandmother’s memoir."
............

"In August of 1941, the German soldiers came into town. Before we fully realized what was happening, the Nazis were in our backyards. Two soldiers stopped my father on the street one day, and one of the soldiers—his name was Karl Ludwig—gave him a pack of cigarettes and the address of his mother in Vienna. “Hitler’s aim is to wipe out all the Jewish people,” he said. “But I feel sorry for your pretty, young daughter. Here is the address of my mother in Vienna. Your daughter should take the train and go there. Don’t tell anyone she is Jewish. My mother will keep her.”

"The six-foot-two soldier continued to call on us for three days, always paying me special attention. He would bring cigarettes for my father each time, along with the same warning for me: “You need to leave. Hitler is coming.”

"On the third day, he called on our house with his helmet under his arm. He’d come to say goodbye to me and my father, but only I was awake. We conversed in German. I didn’t know the language well, but I understood a little bit. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “But I have an order to move on, so that’s what I have to do.”"

"As my father struggled against his captors, a German soldier put a pistol to his head and shot him in cold blood. I was there when it happened, in the house with my mother. As the shot echoed through the town, thudding through my ribcage like an irregular heartbeat, I ran out of the house to find my father lying in a pool of blood. It was raining. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. Torrents of water soaked me through and pelted my father’s unmoving body. I began to hemorrhage, throwing up blood as it ran from my mouth and nose at the same time. I couldn’t even scream. I lost my voice, my words, and just kept throwing up. I was in a daze, a nightmare I couldn’t escape."

"It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before the Hordotchukas came by again, triumphant as they began kicking the women, disabled, elderly, and remaining children from the town. They threatened us with sticks and yelled at us to move fast. It continued to pour as we left behind my parents’ precious dowry collection that they’d hidden in the cellar for my future husband—a silver candelabra, dry goods, shoes, coats, and blankets—and all the pleasant memories of our little duplex. We left in what we were wearing, skirts and blouses. We didn’t take anything with us, except for my brother’s heavy winter jacket. My mother grabbed it on our way out the door and wrapped me up in it.

"We left my father in the backyard with a blanket over his body. My uncle Shevach and his older son Laizel had been taken away with the other men, and my grandfather was with one of his granddaughters, so I didn’t know what had happened to him. Later, I would come to find out that my uncle, cousin, and those other men—all Jewish males over the age of fourteen—had been summoned to the marketplace that day. They had been told to take shovels with them, having been promised to get work that day. The marketplace had been surrounded by German SS troops and Hordotchukas, who’d led the group of men to a close-by village, and they had been shot to death there. They were thrown into mass graves by the Hordotchukas, who stole all the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, gold teeth, and other belongings of the deceased. They didn’t even wait to make sure the Jews were dead before they started burying them. Some were buried alive."

""My brother had been hiding with my father, and he’d been seized as well. We found his body on our way out of town, face down in the grass in a bare space between some houses."

"No one seemed to care where we went, so we walked south out of town. As we walked away from what remained of David-Horodok, a Hordotchuka played the accordion—happy music as we marched toward more suffering. My mother decided we’d go to Sarny, a city about 100 kilometers south of David-Horodok, where she had a cousin who might be able to help us. When we passed by the outskirts of town, we ran across the graves. All the men and boys the soldiers had collected had been killed and piled up in holes they’d dug themselves. No male over the age of fourteen had been spared.

"It continued to rain as we left the town, soaking us through and exhausting us, but I said nothing. It was like someone had taken away my tongue, and I didn’t even have the energy to feel afraid. What was there to be afraid of, anyway? I’d just seen the worst horrors imaginable take place right outside my childhood home. That night, when it got too dark to see anymore, we collapsed onto the wet grass and slept. I heard that some Ukrainian men later came and took the young girls they could find, raping them in the fields as the others slept. My brother’s jacket may have saved me from that atrocity. Wrapped up in it and sleeping, I must have looked like an old woman."

"My voice did not return, not for a long time.

"I was still able to see my mother every day, since the houses were just a few blocks from each other. There was a zalman, a single man, staying at the same house as my mother. He would come out and talk to me occasionally about school and Israel. I never said much during our conversations. I was very depressed after what happened to my father and brother. I was in shock. I didn’t talk, and I couldn’t stand when I heard people talking. Instead, I would walk away and stay secluded. These days, they probably would’ve sent me to a psychiatrist. My mother, on the other hand, was incredibly brave. She saw that I was sick, that I was a changed person. She kept to herself and never mentioned my father’s or brother’s names, even though I knew she was hurting just as much as I was.

"It would be years before I realized that we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to talk about it.

"For a whole year, my mother was able to provide food for the both of us by trading her skill at sewing with a Ukrainian widow. We coexisted with the Ukrainians for a little more than a year, but, in the spring of 1942, we were uprooted again when the Germans formed a ghetto in Sarny to isolate all the Jews and keep them imprisoned."

What happened next, or rather, how the Jews in Sarny were massacred, in thousands, by Germans and their Ukrainian helpers, is described in the next chapter. The horror of this more than matches the infamous Katyn massacre. Beatrice was saved due to a cousin quietly drawing her away and hiding in a very small bunkerlike space for several days.

"When we couldn’t take it anymore, we started to venture out to look for food. Eventually, I was spotted by a German soldier. He learned my routes and followed me one night, giving me a slip of paper with an address written on it. “This is my address,” he said quietly. “Get there and see my mother. She will protect you until I come back.” I figured he had romantic intentions and tore up the address as soon as he was out of sight. Thinking back, it could have been his way to save my life."

"Aunt Dreizel finally told me to go outside the ghetto and visit a Polish couple who lived near its border to beg for some food. “Tell them you are by yourself,” she ordered me before sending me on my way.

"Since the ghetto had been liquidated, and since we were near the edge of the ghetto as it was, I found my way to the Polish couple’s house with little trouble. Their last name was Goldchevsky, and I knew them from before the ghetto liquidation. Mrs. Goldchevsky took me in and washed my hair with a bowl of water, caring for me as if I was her own child. She suddenly looked at me and said, “You know, we don’t have any children. We are going to keep you behind the dresser, and, after the war, you will marry a Polish man.”"

Beatrice said she'd come back, and did when the hideout was discovered, but the Ukrainian police were coming to the house of Mrs. Goldchevsky and she told Beatrice, who escaped. At another farm, a woman fed her lovingly, but said her son was Nazi, and gave her a sack and hatchet so she could go pretending she was digging for potatoes. Another Russian woman saved her by blocking her from the view of another guard with her own body, until he left. She hugged and kissed Beatrice and wept, saying she'd wanted to keep her but was now afraid, before letting her escape after he'd left promising to bring a hundred guards.

Beatrice next found refuge with a Polish family, named Yanacheck, in their farmhouse. They hid, fed and protected her in the barn until it was too cold, and then in their home.

"One day in the spring of 1943, the Ukrainians decided they wanted their own independent country. The Jews had been driven out, and now they wanted the Polish people killed as well. News spread that they were burning all the Polish farms in the region and killing their inhabitants with knives and hatchets. I didn’t become aware of this until one morning, when I awoke to the sound of the Yanachecks packing in a hurry to leave their farm. When I asked what was going on, Mrs. Yanacheck tearfully explained everything.

"“We’re going to Germany,” she finally said. “We’re right along the border already—I think we can do it. You better come along too!”"

She got separated from them during the journey, but was treated kindly by other strangers, and sent to work at a farmhouse, where she learned milking and other things. Due to her blue eyes and blond hair, she was taken to be Polish. But then, one day as Easter approached, a co-worker asked her if she'd been to confession, and she responded incorrectly due to her exhaustion so her identity was exposed; she left the farm telling the woman she was returning to Sarny where her family owned a house.

The Yanacheck family had a relative,Anna Kopera, who was her age and who'd died along with her family in the war, so they'd said they'd tell everyone she was Anna Kopera. So Beatrice assumed that identity and got work in Germany, and asked to work in kitchen, was sent to a resort for German soldiers at Tegernsee. She found a friend, another girl her age, Valla, and later they left for Vienna, Valla assuring her it was a nicer place.

They worked in a restaurant in Vienna, but the bombing raids were frightening. They went on to a mess at a training facility for youth, but war came to them, from east, and they returned to Vienna working at a hospital. Valla returned home, and Beatrice stayed on. She was with the hospital, which had moved to Hungary, when liberation came. After that the hospital moved to Budapest, and then to Romania. There, for the first time after years, she met other Jews.

"I was recommended to a little shoe shop, where I instantly noticed the shoemaker and his family were Jewish. As I waited, they confirmed my suspicions by speaking Yiddish to each other.

"“I hope you aren’t going to say anything about me,” I said in Russian, giving them a smile. “I can understand every word you’re saying.”

"They froze, staring at me and narrowing their eyes a little. “How?” they asked.

"“I’m Jewish.” A shiver crept up my spine as I realized that this was the first time I’d said outright that I was Jewish since my childhood.

"They didn’t believe me, mainly because I didn’t look the part. They began to speak to me in Yiddish, and I realized that I couldn’t even utter a word in reply. So many years of using Russian, Polish, and German had erased my memories of Yiddish.

"“She must have worked for a Jewish family and picked up a few words,” the shoemaker’s helper, a young man, said in Yiddish.

"The shoemaker nodded. “There isn’t any way she’s Jewish.”

"He strode over to the window and picked up a Romanian paper, handing it to me and pointing out a block of text in Hebrew.

"“I can read that,” I said, and read the entire thing in Hebrew. I hadn’t spoken it in so long, yet I remembered every word and pronunciation.

"“You are blood!” They started kissing me and hugging me, already talking about how they were going to help me find a choisen, a groom, that evening.

"True to their word, they took me to another shoemaker’s place that night and ....

[Dr.J.G.]

The book is from compilation of transcripts of interviews that the author's grandmother gave to various people and organisations, including some ten hours of interviews with the author over several days in 2016.

"“In every generation, each person is obligated to view for themselves as if they had been there and left Egypt.”

"In other words, we are required to put ourselves in the Exodus narrative and try to imagine that we, as individuals, were witnesses to the slavery of our people and their eventual deliverance out of Egypt to the promised land of Israel. The following memoir entailed a long, complex process, but I like to think that the words in this memoir of the matriarch of my family serve as our own sort of Haggadah. While it’s a telling of a story not two-thousand years old, but a mere seventy-five years old, because of my grandmother’s survival, we are here today. Because of her, we are a family bound by our connection to this remarkable story of hope, luck, and faith."

"To find more answers, I contacted the International Tracing Service and found documents of my grandmother’s time in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany after the war. I also came across her listing on the ship manifest when she and her family came to America in 1949 and dug into the family tree, coming across cousins from both Bea’s maternal and paternal lineage. Perhaps most interestingly, I discovered that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ida Rosenblum, who is only six months younger than she is, lives in the building next door to her. Due to a family misunderstanding, they did not know each other, despite raising their families less than a mile from one another. I think, therefore, that it is important to recognize the deep wounds the Holocaust created and that, even seventy-five years later, some of these small fragments of shattered families are only now being pieced back together.

"In August of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to David-Horodok, which is in present-day Belarus, with the David-Horodok organization of Detroit. Together, with other David-Horodok descendants from Detroit and Israel, we walked the cobblestone streets of the town that was once a thriving Jewish community. I found the street on which my grandmother’s house once stood. We walked the seven kilometers to the mass grave where Bea’s brother and father most likely remain, and later journeyed to Sarny, which is today across the border in the Ukraine. Grandma and her mother walked this 100-kilometer journey together in August of 1941.

"There, on the outskirts of town, are three large mounds of earth—the three mass graves in which nearly 18,000 Jews were murdered during the liquidation of the Sarny ghetto. This is the resting place of Bea’s mother. Seeing these locations firsthand was a moving and emotional experience and motivated me further to help complete my grandmother’s memoir."
............

"In August of 1941, the German soldiers came into town. Before we fully realized what was happening, the Nazis were in our backyards. Two soldiers stopped my father on the street one day, and one of the soldiers—his name was Karl Ludwig—gave him a pack of cigarettes and the address of his mother in Vienna. “Hitler’s aim is to wipe out all the Jewish people,” he said. “But I feel sorry for your pretty, young daughter. Here is the address of my mother in Vienna. Your daughter should take the train and go there. Don’t tell anyone she is Jewish. My mother will keep her.”

"The six-foot-two soldier continued to call on us for three days, always paying me special attention. He would bring cigarettes for my father each time, along with the same warning for me: “You need to leave. Hitler is coming.”

"On the third day, he called on our house with his helmet under his arm. He’d come to say goodbye to me and my father, but only I was awake. We conversed in German. I didn’t know the language well, but I understood a little bit. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “But I have an order to move on, so that’s what I have to do.”"

"As my father struggled against his captors, a German soldier put a pistol to his head and shot him in cold blood. I was there when it happened, in the house with my mother. As the shot echoed through the town, thudding through my ribcage like an irregular heartbeat, I ran out of the house to find my father lying in a pool of blood. It was raining. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. Torrents of water soaked me through and pelted my father’s unmoving body. I began to hemorrhage, throwing up blood as it ran from my mouth and nose at the same time. I couldn’t even scream. I lost my voice, my words, and just kept throwing up. I was in a daze, a nightmare I couldn’t escape."

"It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before the Hordotchukas came by again, triumphant as they began kicking the women, disabled, elderly, and remaining children from the town. They threatened us with sticks and yelled at us to move fast. It continued to pour as we left behind my parents’ precious dowry collection that they’d hidden in the cellar for my future husband—a silver candelabra, dry goods, shoes, coats, and blankets—and all the pleasant memories of our little duplex. We left in what we were wearing, skirts and blouses. We didn’t take anything with us, except for my brother’s heavy winter jacket. My mother grabbed it on our way out the door and wrapped me up in it.

"We left my father in the backyard with a blanket over his body. My uncle Shevach and his older son Laizel had been taken away with the other men, and my grandfather was with one of his granddaughters, so I didn’t know what had happened to him. Later, I would come to find out that my uncle, cousin, and those other men—all Jewish males over the age of fourteen—had been summoned to the marketplace that day. They had been told to take shovels with them, having been promised to get work that day. The marketplace had been surrounded by German SS troops and Hordotchukas, who’d led the group of men to a close-by village, and they had been shot to death there. They were thrown into mass graves by the Hordotchukas, who stole all the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, gold teeth, and other belongings of the deceased. They didn’t even wait to make sure the Jews were dead before they started burying them. Some were buried alive."

""My brother had been hiding with my father, and he’d been seized as well. We found his body on our way out of town, face down in the grass in a bare space between some houses."

"No one seemed to care where we went, so we walked south out of town. As we walked away from what remained of David-Horodok, a Hordotchuka played the accordion—happy music as we marched toward more suffering. My mother decided we’d go to Sarny, a city about 100 kilometers south of David-Horodok, where she had a cousin who might be able to help us. When we passed by the outskirts of town, we ran across the graves. All the men and boys the soldiers had collected had been killed and piled up in holes they’d dug themselves. No male over the age of fourteen had been spared.

"It continued to rain as we left the town, soaking us through and exhausting us, but I said nothing. It was like someone had taken away my tongue, and I didn’t even have the energy to feel afraid. What was there to be afraid of, anyway? I’d just seen the worst horrors imaginable take place right outside my childhood home. That night, when it got too dark to see anymore, we collapsed onto the wet grass and slept. I heard that some Ukrainian men later came and took the young girls they could find, raping them in the fields as the others slept. My brother’s jacket may have saved me from that atrocity. Wrapped up in it and sleeping, I must have looked like an old woman."

"My voice did not return, not for a long time.

"I was still able to see my mother every day, since the houses were just a few blocks from each other. There was a zalman, a single man, staying at the same house as my mother. He would come out and talk to me occasionally about school and Israel. I never said much during our conversations. I was very depressed after what happened to my father and brother. I was in shock. I didn’t talk, and I couldn’t stand when I heard people talking. Instead, I would walk away and stay secluded. These days, they probably would’ve sent me to a psychiatrist. My mother, on the other hand, was incredibly brave. She saw that I was sick, that I was a changed person. She kept to herself and never mentioned my father’s or brother’s names, even though I knew she was hurting just as much as I was.

"It would be years before I realized that we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to talk about it.

"For a whole year, my mother was able to provide food for the both of us by trading her skill at sewing with a Ukrainian widow. We coexisted with the Ukrainians for a little more than a year, but, in the spring of 1942, we were uprooted again when the Germans formed a ghetto in Sarny to isolate all the Jews and keep them imprisoned."

What happened next, or rather, how the Jews in Sarny were massacred, in thousands, by Germans and their Ukrainian helpers, is described in the next chapter. The horror of this more than matches the infamous Katyn massacre. Beatrice was saved due to a cousin quietly drawing her away and hiding in a very small bunkerlike space for several days.

"When we couldn’t take it anymore, we started to venture out to look for food. Eventually, I was spotted by a German soldier. He learned my routes and followed me one night, giving me a slip of paper with an address written on it. “This is my address,” he said quietly. “Get there and see my mother. She will protect you until I come back.” I figured he had romantic intentions and tore up the address as soon as he was out of sight. Thinking back, it could have been his way to save my life."

"Aunt Dreizel finally told me to go outside the ghetto and visit a Polish couple who lived near its border to beg for some food. “Tell them you are by yourself,” she ordered me before sending me on my way.

"Since the ghetto had been liquidated, and since we were near the edge of the ghetto as it was, I found my way to the Polish couple’s house with little trouble. Their last name was Goldchevsky, and I knew them from before the ghetto liquidation. Mrs. Goldchevsky took me in and washed my hair with a bowl of water, caring for me as if I was her own child. She suddenly looked at me and said, “You know, we don’t have any children. We are going to keep you behind the dresser, and, after the war, you will marry a Polish man.”"

Beatrice said she'd come back, and did when the hideout was discovered, but the Ukrainian police were coming to the house of Mrs. Goldchevsky and she told Beatrice, who escaped. At another farm, a woman fed her lovingly, but said her son was Nazi, and gave her a sack and hatchet so she could go pretending she was digging for potatoes. Another Russian woman saved her by blocking her from the view of another guard with her own body, until he left. She hugged and kissed Beatrice and wept, saying she'd wanted to keep her but was now afraid, before letting her escape after he'd left promising to bring a hundred guards.

Beatrice next found refuge with a Polish family, named Yanacheck, in their farmhouse. They hid, fed and protected her in the barn until it was too cold, and then in their home.

"One day in the spring of 1943, the Ukrainians decided they wanted their own independent country. The Jews had been driven out, and now they wanted the Polish people killed as well. News spread that they were burning all the Polish farms in the region and killing their inhabitants with knives and hatchets. I didn’t become aware of this until one morning, when I awoke to the sound of the Yanachecks packing in a hurry to leave their farm. When I asked what was going on, Mrs. Yanacheck tearfully explained everything.

"“We’re going to Germany,” she finally said. “We’re right along the border already—I think we can do it. You better come along too!”"

She got separated from them during the journey, but was treated kindly by other strangers, and sent to work at a farmhouse, where she learned milking and other things. Due to her blue eyes and blond hair, she was taken to be Polish. But then, one day as Easter approached, a co-worker asked her if she'd been to confession, and she responded incorrectly due to her exhaustion so her identity was exposed; she left the farm telling the woman she was returning to Sarny where her family owned a house.

The Yanacheck family had a relative,Anna Kopera, who was her age and who'd died along with her family in the war, so they'd said they'd tell everyone she was Anna Kopera. So Beatrice assumed that identity and got work in Germany, and asked to work in kitchen, was sent to a resort for German soldiers at Tegernsee. She found a friend, another girl her age, Valla, and later they left for Vienna, Valla assuring her it was a nicer place.

They worked in a restaurant in Vienna, but the bombing raids were frightening. They went on to a mess at a training facility for youth, but war came to them, from east, and they returned to Vienna working at a hospital. Valla returned home, and Beatrice stayed on. She was with the hospital, which had moved to Hungary, when liberation came. After that the hospital moved to Budapest, and then to Romania. There, for the first time after years, she met other Jews.

"I was recommended to a little shoe shop, where I instantly noticed the shoemaker and his family were Jewish. As I waited, they confirmed my suspicions by speaking Yiddish to each other.

"“I hope you aren’t going to say anything about me,” I said in Russian, giving them a smile. “I can understand every word you’re saying.”

"They froze, staring at me and narrowing their eyes a little. “How?” they asked.

"“I’m Jewish.” A shiver crept up my spine as I realized that this was the first time I’d said outright that I was Jewish since my childhood.

"They didn’t believe me, mainly because I didn’t look the part. They began to speak to me in Yiddish, and I realized that I couldn’t even utter a word in reply. So many years of using Russian, Polish, and German had erased my memories of Yiddish.

"“She must have worked for a Jewish family and picked up a few words,” the shoemaker’s helper, a young man, said in Yiddish.

"The shoemaker nodded. “There isn’t any way she’s Jewish.”

"He strode over to the window and picked up a Romanian paper, handing it to me and pointing out a block of text in Hebrew.

"“I can read that,” I said, and read the entire thing in Hebrew. I hadn’t spoken it in so long, yet I remembered every word and pronunciation.

"“You are blood!” They started kissing me and hugging me, already talking about how they were going to help me find a choisen, a groom, that evening.

"True to their word, they took me to another shoemaker’s place that night and ....

[Dr.J.G.]

The book is from compilation of transcripts of interviews that the author's grandmother gave to various people and organisations, including some ten hours of interviews with the author over several days in 2016.

"“In every generation, each person is obligated to view for themselves as if they had been there and left Egypt.”

"In other words, we are required to put ourselves in the Exodus narrative and try to imagine that we, as individuals, were witnesses to the slavery of our people and their eventual deliverance out of Egypt to the promised land of Israel. The following memoir entailed a long, complex process, but I like to think that the words in this memoir of the matriarch of my family serve as our own sort of Haggadah. While it’s a telling of a story not two-thousand years old, but a mere seventy-five years old, because of my grandmother’s survival, we are here today. Because of her, we are a family bound by our connection to this remarkable story of hope, luck, and faith."

"To find more answers, I contacted the International Tracing Service and found documents of my grandmother’s time in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany after the war. I also came across her listing on the ship manifest when she and her family came to America in 1949 and dug into the family tree, coming across cousins from both Bea’s maternal and paternal lineage. Perhaps most interestingly, I discovered that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ida Rosenblum, who is only six months younger than she is, lives in the building next door to her. Due to a family misunderstanding, they did not know each other, despite raising their families less than a mile from one another. I think, therefore, that it is important to recognize the deep wounds the Holocaust created and that, even seventy-five years later, some of these small fragments of shattered families are only now being pieced back together.

"In August of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to David-Horodok, which is in present-day Belarus, with the David-Horodok organization of Detroit. Together, with other David-Horodok descendants from Detroit and Israel, we walked the cobblestone streets of the town that was once a thriving Jewish community. I found the street on which my grandmother’s house once stood. We walked the seven kilometers to the mass grave where Bea’s brother and father most likely remain, and later journeyed to Sarny, which is today across the border in the Ukraine. Grandma and her mother walked this 100-kilometer journey together in August of 1941.

"There, on the outskirts of town, are three large mounds of earth—the three mass graves in which nearly 18,000 Jews were murdered during the liquidation of the Sarny ghetto. This is the resting place of Bea’s mother. Seeing these locations firsthand was a moving and emotional experience and motivated me further to help complete my grandmother’s memoir."
............

"In August of 1941, the German soldiers came into town. Before we fully realized what was happening, the Nazis were in our backyards. Two soldiers stopped my father on the street one day, and one of the soldiers—his name was Karl Ludwig—gave him a pack of cigarettes and the address of his mother in Vienna. “Hitler’s aim is to wipe out all the Jewish people,” he said. “But I feel sorry for your pretty, young daughter. Here is the address of my mother in Vienna. Your daughter should take the train and go there. Don’t tell anyone she is Jewish. My mother will keep her.”

"The six-foot-two soldier continued to call on us for three days, always paying me special attention. He would bring cigarettes for my father each time, along with the same warning for me: “You need to leave. Hitler is coming.”

"On the third day, he called on our house with his helmet under his arm. He’d come to say goodbye to me and my father, but only I was awake. We conversed in German. I didn’t know the language well, but I understood a little bit. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “But I have an order to move on, so that’s what I have to do.”"

"As my father struggled against his captors, a German soldier put a pistol to his head and shot him in cold blood. I was there when it happened, in the house with my mother. As the shot echoed through the town, thudding through my ribcage like an irregular heartbeat, I ran out of the house to find my father lying in a pool of blood. It was raining. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. Torrents of water soaked me through and pelted my father’s unmoving body. I began to hemorrhage, throwing up blood as it ran from my mouth and nose at the same time. I couldn’t even scream. I lost my voice, my words, and just kept throwing up. I was in a daze, a nightmare I couldn’t escape."

"It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before the Hordotchukas came by again, triumphant as they began kicking the women, disabled, elderly, and remaining children from the town. They threatened us with sticks and yelled at us to move fast. It continued to pour as we left behind my parents’ precious dowry collection that they’d hidden in the cellar for my future husband—a silver candelabra, dry goods, shoes, coats, and blankets—and all the pleasant memories of our little duplex. We left in what we were wearing, skirts and blouses. We didn’t take anything with us, except for my brother’s heavy winter jacket. My mother grabbed it on our way out the door and wrapped me up in it.

"We left my father in the backyard with a blanket over his body. My uncle Shevach and his older son Laizel had been taken away with the other men, and my grandfather was with one of his granddaughters, so I didn’t know what had happened to him. Later, I would come to find out that my uncle, cousin, and those other men—all Jewish males over the age of fourteen—had been summoned to the marketplace that day. They had been told to take shovels with them, having been promised to get work that day. The marketplace had been surrounded by German SS troops and Hordotchukas, who’d led the group of men to a close-by village, and they had been shot to death there. They were thrown into mass graves by the Hordotchukas, who stole all the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, gold teeth, and other belongings of the deceased. They didn’t even wait to make sure the Jews were dead before they started burying them. Some were buried alive."

""My brother had been hiding with my father, and he’d been seized as well. We found his body on our way out of town, face down in the grass in a bare space between some houses."

"No one seemed to care where we went, so we walked south out of town. As we walked away from what remained of David-Horodok, a Hordotchuka played the accordion—happy music as we marched toward more suffering. My mother decided we’d go to Sarny, a city about 100 kilometers south of David-Horodok, where she had a cousin who might be able to help us. When we passed by the outskirts of town, we ran across the graves. All the men and boys the soldiers had collected had been killed and piled up in holes they’d dug themselves. No male over the age of fourteen had been spared.

"It continued to rain as we left the town, soaking us through and exhausting us, but I said nothing. It was like someone had taken away my tongue, and I didn’t even have the energy to feel afraid. What was there to be afraid of, anyway? I’d just seen the worst horrors imaginable take place right outside my childhood home. That night, when it got too dark to see anymore, we collapsed onto the wet grass and slept. I heard that some Ukrainian men later came and took the young girls they could find, raping them in the fields as the others slept. My brother’s jacket may have saved me from that atrocity. Wrapped up in it and sleeping, I must have looked like an old woman."

"My voice did not return, not for a long time.

"I was still able to see my mother every day, since the houses were just a few blocks from each other. There was a zalman, a single man, staying at the same house as my mother. He would come out and talk to me occasionally about school and Israel. I never said much during our conversations. I was very depressed after what happened to my father and brother. I was in shock. I didn’t talk, and I couldn’t stand when I heard people talking. Instead, I would walk away and stay secluded. These days, they probably would’ve sent me to a psychiatrist. My mother, on the other hand, was incredibly brave. She saw that I was sick, that I was a changed person. She kept to herself and never mentioned my father’s or brother’s names, even though I knew she was hurting just as much as I was.

"It would be years before I realized that we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to talk about it.

"For a whole year, my mother was able to provide food for the both of us by trading her skill at sewing with a Ukrainian widow. We coexisted with the Ukrainians for a little more than a year, but, in the spring of 1942, we were uprooted again when the Germans formed a ghetto in Sarny to isolate all the Jews and keep them imprisoned."

What happened next, or rather, how the Jews in Sarny were massacred, in thousands, by Germans and their Ukrainian helpers, is described in the next chapter. The horror of this more than matches the infamous Katyn massacre. Beatrice was saved due to a cousin quietly drawing her away and hiding in a very small bunkerlike space for several days.

"When we couldn’t take it anymore, we started to venture out to look for food. Eventually, I was spotted by a German soldier. He learned my routes and followed me one night, giving me a slip of paper with an address written on it. “This is my address,” he said quietly. “Get there and see my mother. She will protect you until I come back.” I figured he had romantic intentions and tore up the address as soon as he was out of sight. Thinking back, it could have been his way to save my life."

"Aunt Dreizel finally told me to go outside the ghetto and visit a Polish couple who lived near its border to beg for some food. “Tell them you are by yourself,” she ordered me before sending me on my way.

"Since the ghetto had been liquidated, and since we were near the edge of the ghetto as it was, I found my way to the Polish couple’s house with little trouble. Their last name was Goldchevsky, and I knew them from before the ghetto liquidation. Mrs. Goldchevsky took me in and washed my hair with a bowl of water, caring for me as if I was her own child. She suddenly looked at me and said, “You know, we don’t have any children. We are going to keep you behind the dresser, and, after the war, you will marry a Polish man.”"

Beatrice said she'd come back, and did when the hideout was discovered, but the Ukrainian police were coming to the house of Mrs. Goldchevsky and she told Beatrice, who escaped. At another farm, a woman fed her lovingly, but said her son was Nazi, and gave her a sack and hatchet so she could go pretending she was digging for potatoes. Another Russian woman saved her by blocking her from the view of another guard with her own body, until he left. She hugged and kissed Beatrice and wept, saying she'd wanted to keep her but was now afraid, before letting her escape after he'd left promising to bring a hundred guards.

Beatrice next found refuge with a Polish family, named Yanacheck, in their farmhouse. They hid, fed and protected her in the barn until it was too cold, and then in their home.

"One day in the spring of 1943, the Ukrainians decided they wanted their own independent country. The Jews had been driven out, and now they wanted the Polish people killed as well. News spread that they were burning all the Polish farms in the region and killing their inhabitants with knives and hatchets. I didn’t become aware of this until one morning, when I awoke to the sound of the Yanachecks packing in a hurry to leave their farm. When I asked what was going on, Mrs. Yanacheck tearfully explained everything.

"“We’re going to Germany,” she finally said. “We’re right along the border already—I think we can do it. You better come along too!”"

She got separated from them during the journey, but was treated kindly by other strangers, and sent to work at a farmhouse, where she learned milking and other things. Due to her blue eyes and blond hair, she was taken to be Polish. But then, one day as Easter approached, a co-worker asked her if she'd been to confession, and she responded incorrectly due to her exhaustion so her identity was exposed; she left the farm telling the woman she was returning to Sarny where her family owned a house.

The Yanacheck family had a relative,Anna Kopera, who was her age and who'd died along with her family in the war, so they'd said they'd tell everyone she was Anna Kopera. So Beatrice assumed that identity and got work in Germany, and asked to work in kitchen, was sent to a resort for German soldiers at Tegernsee. She found a friend, another girl her age, Valla, and later they left for Vienna, Valla assuring her it was a nicer place.

They worked in a restaurant in Vienna, but the bombing raids were frightening. They went on to a mess at a training facility for youth, but war came to them, from east, and they returned to Vienna working at a hospital. Valla returned home, and Beatrice stayed on. She was with the hospital, which had moved to Hungary, when liberation came. After that the hospital moved to Budapest, and then to Romania. There, for the first time after years, she met other Jews.

"I was recommended to a little shoe shop, where I instantly noticed the shoemaker and his family were Jewish. As I waited, they confirmed my suspicions by speaking Yiddish to each other.

"“I hope you aren’t going to say anything about me,” I said in Russian, giving them a smile. “I can understand every word you’re saying.”

"They froze, staring at me and narrowing their eyes a little. “How?” they asked.

"“I’m Jewish.” A shiver crept up my spine as I realized that this was the first time I’d said outright that I was Jewish since my childhood.

"They didn’t believe me, mainly because I didn’t look the part. They began to speak to me in Yiddish, and I realized that I couldn’t even utter a word in reply. So many years of using Russian, Polish, and German had erased my memories of Yiddish.

"“She must have worked for a Jewish family and picked up a few words,” the shoemaker’s helper, a young man, said in Yiddish.

"The shoemaker nodded. “There isn’t any way she’s Jewish.”

"He strode over to the window and picked up a Romanian paper, handing it to me and pointing out a block of text in Hebrew.

"“I can read that,” I said, and read the entire thing in Hebrew. I hadn’t spoken it in so long, yet I remembered every word and pronunciation.

"“You are blood!” They started kissing me and hugging me, already talking about how they were going to help me find a choisen, a groom, that evening.

"True to their word, they took me to another shoemaker’s place that night and ....

[sharon s stewart]

Concise telling of Bia's journey to survival.

Not an emotionally charged first person account but it was almost more powerful because of that. I would stop to reflect on what I read after an accounting and then it would hit me just how well the author told her story without conveying drama and emotion...almost like the only way she could tell it was to stand outside of herself and describe events she lived through. The reader was able then to view the author's experiences in a way that was like standing next to her and watching the memory unfold through the author's eyes. I found this style very powerful.

[Lawrence Wilson]

Ok book

Enjoyed the part during the war. She seemed somewhat self absorbed after that. Not too well written. It's an OK book.

[Susan]

Golden

A very likable Holocaust true story of the girl with the golden hair. Through all the tragedies, the heroine of this nonfiction story, emerges as a true and now safe American.

[Cheryl]

This book was very interesting. It was extremely revealing as to what was going on throughout Poland and Romania, and throughout the eastern front. It was authentic and genuine. I could feel her pain and emotional distress. I would highly recommend this book, you will not be disappointed.

[Elizabeth Westra]

A child's nightmare

This is the story of a young Jewish girl's survival during the Holocaust after losing her family. All alone and facing grave dangers she managed to escape the Nazis and gain freedom.

[Dr.J.G.]

The book is from compilation of transcripts of interviews that the author's grandmother gave to various people and organisations, including some ten hours of interviews with the author over several days in 2016.

"“In every generation, each person is obligated to view for themselves as if they had been there and left Egypt.”

"In other words, we are required to put ourselves in the Exodus narrative and try to imagine that we, as individuals, were witnesses to the slavery of our people and their eventual deliverance out of Egypt to the promised land of Israel. The following memoir entailed a long, complex process, but I like to think that the words in this memoir of the matriarch of my family serve as our own sort of Haggadah. While it’s a telling of a story not two-thousand years old, but a mere seventy-five years old, because of my grandmother’s survival, we are here today. Because of her, we are a family bound by our connection to this remarkable story of hope, luck, and faith."

"To find more answers, I contacted the International Tracing Service and found documents of my grandmother’s time in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany after the war. I also came across her listing on the ship manifest when she and her family came to America in 1949 and dug into the family tree, coming across cousins from both Bea’s maternal and paternal lineage. Perhaps most interestingly, I discovered that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ida Rosenblum, who is only six months younger than she is, lives in the building next door to her. Due to a family misunderstanding, they did not know each other, despite raising their families less than a mile from one another. I think, therefore, that it is important to recognize the deep wounds the Holocaust created and that, even seventy-five years later, some of these small fragments of shattered families are only now being pieced back together.

"In August of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to David-Horodok, which is in present-day Belarus, with the David-Horodok organization of Detroit. Together, with other David-Horodok descendants from Detroit and Israel, we walked the cobblestone streets of the town that was once a thriving Jewish community. I found the street on which my grandmother’s house once stood. We walked the seven kilometers to the mass grave where Bea’s brother and father most likely remain, and later journeyed to Sarny, which is today across the border in the Ukraine. Grandma and her mother walked this 100-kilometer journey together in August of 1941.

"There, on the outskirts of town, are three large mounds of earth—the three mass graves in which nearly 18,000 Jews were murdered during the liquidation of the Sarny ghetto. This is the resting place of Bea’s mother. Seeing these locations firsthand was a moving and emotional experience and motivated me further to help complete my grandmother’s memoir."
............

"In August of 1941, the German soldiers came into town. Before we fully realized what was happening, the Nazis were in our backyards. Two soldiers stopped my father on the street one day, and one of the soldiers—his name was Karl Ludwig—gave him a pack of cigarettes and the address of his mother in Vienna. “Hitler’s aim is to wipe out all the Jewish people,” he said. “But I feel sorry for your pretty, young daughter. Here is the address of my mother in Vienna. Your daughter should take the train and go there. Don’t tell anyone she is Jewish. My mother will keep her.”

"The six-foot-two soldier continued to call on us for three days, always paying me special attention. He would bring cigarettes for my father each time, along with the same warning for me: “You need to leave. Hitler is coming.”

"On the third day, he called on our house with his helmet under his arm. He’d come to say goodbye to me and my father, but only I was awake. We conversed in German. I didn’t know the language well, but I understood a little bit. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “But I have an order to move on, so that’s what I have to do.”"

"As my father struggled against his captors, a German soldier put a pistol to his head and shot him in cold blood. I was there when it happened, in the house with my mother. As the shot echoed through the town, thudding through my ribcage like an irregular heartbeat, I ran out of the house to find my father lying in a pool of blood. It was raining. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. Torrents of water soaked me through and pelted my father’s unmoving body. I began to hemorrhage, throwing up blood as it ran from my mouth and nose at the same time. I couldn’t even scream. I lost my voice, my words, and just kept throwing up. I was in a daze, a nightmare I couldn’t escape."

"It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before the Hordotchukas came by again, triumphant as they began kicking the women, disabled, elderly, and remaining children from the town. They threatened us with sticks and yelled at us to move fast. It continued to pour as we left behind my parents’ precious dowry collection that they’d hidden in the cellar for my future husband—a silver candelabra, dry goods, shoes, coats, and blankets—and all the pleasant memories of our little duplex. We left in what we were wearing, skirts and blouses. We didn’t take anything with us, except for my brother’s heavy winter jacket. My mother grabbed it on our way out the door and wrapped me up in it.

"We left my father in the backyard with a blanket over his body. My uncle Shevach and his older son Laizel had been taken away with the other men, and my grandfather was with one of his granddaughters, so I didn’t know what had happened to him. Later, I would come to find out that my uncle, cousin, and those other men—all Jewish males over the age of fourteen—had been summoned to the marketplace that day. They had been told to take shovels with them, having been promised to get work that day. The marketplace had been surrounded by German SS troops and Hordotchukas, who’d led the group of men to a close-by village, and they had been shot to death there. They were thrown into mass graves by the Hordotchukas, who stole all the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, gold teeth, and other belongings of the deceased. They didn’t even wait to make sure the Jews were dead before they started burying them. Some were buried alive."

""My brother had been hiding with my father, and he’d been seized as well. We found his body on our way out of town, face down in the grass in a bare space between some houses."

"No one seemed to care where we went, so we walked south out of town. As we walked away from what remained of David-Horodok, a Hordotchuka played the accordion—happy music as we marched toward more suffering. My mother decided we’d go to Sarny, a city about 100 kilometers south of David-Horodok, where she had a cousin who might be able to help us. When we passed by the outskirts of town, we ran across the graves. All the men and boys the soldiers had collected had been killed and piled up in holes they’d dug themselves. No male over the age of fourteen had been spared.

"It continued to rain as we left the town, soaking us through and exhausting us, but I said nothing. It was like someone had taken away my tongue, and I didn’t even have the energy to feel afraid. What was there to be afraid of, anyway? I’d just seen the worst horrors imaginable take place right outside my childhood home. That night, when it got too dark to see anymore, we collapsed onto the wet grass and slept. I heard that some Ukrainian men later came and took the young girls they could find, raping them in the fields as the others slept. My brother’s jacket may have saved me from that atrocity. Wrapped up in it and sleeping, I must have looked like an old woman."

"My voice did not return, not for a long time.

"I was still able to see my mother every day, since the houses were just a few blocks from each other. There was a zalman, a single man, staying at the same house as my mother. He would come out and talk to me occasionally about school and Israel. I never said much during our conversations. I was very depressed after what happened to my father and brother. I was in shock. I didn’t talk, and I couldn’t stand when I heard people talking. Instead, I would walk away and stay secluded. These days, they probably would’ve sent me to a psychiatrist. My mother, on the other hand, was incredibly brave. She saw that I was sick, that I was a changed person. She kept to herself and never mentioned my father’s or brother’s names, even though I knew she was hurting just as much as I was.

"It would be years before I realized that we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to talk about it.

"For a whole year, my mother was able to provide food for the both of us by trading her skill at sewing with a Ukrainian widow. We coexisted with the Ukrainians for a little more than a year, but, in the spring of 1942, we were uprooted again when the Germans formed a ghetto in Sarny to isolate all the Jews and keep them imprisoned."

What happened next, or rather, how the Jews in Sarny were massacred, in thousands, by Germans and their Ukrainian helpers, is described in the next chapter. The horror of this more than matches the infamous Katyn massacre. Beatrice was saved due to a cousin quietly drawing her away and hiding in a very small bunkerlike space for several days.

"When we couldn’t take it anymore, we started to venture out to look for food. Eventually, I was spotted by a German soldier. He learned my routes and followed me one night, giving me a slip of paper with an address written on it. “This is my address,” he said quietly. “Get there and see my mother. She will protect you until I come back.” I figured he had romantic intentions and tore up the address as soon as he was out of sight. Thinking back, it could have been his way to save my life."

"Aunt Dreizel finally told me to go outside the ghetto and visit a Polish couple who lived near its border to beg for some food. “Tell them you are by yourself,” she ordered me before sending me on my way.

"Since the ghetto had been liquidated, and since we were near the edge of the ghetto as it was, I found my way to the Polish couple’s house with little trouble. Their last name was Goldchevsky, and I knew them from before the ghetto liquidation. Mrs. Goldchevsky took me in and washed my hair with a bowl of water, caring for me as if I was her own child. She suddenly looked at me and said, “You know, we don’t have any children. We are going to keep you behind the dresser, and, after the war, you will marry a Polish man.”"

Beatrice said she'd come back, and did when the hideout was discovered, but the Ukrainian police were coming to the house of Mrs. Goldchevsky and she told Beatrice, who escaped. At another farm, a woman fed her lovingly, but said her son was Nazi, and gave her a sack and hatchet so she could go pretending she was digging for potatoes. Another Russian woman saved her by blocking her from the view of another guard with her own body, until he left. She hugged and kissed Beatrice and wept, saying she'd wanted to keep her but was now afraid, before letting her escape after he'd left promising to bring a hundred guards.

Beatrice next found refuge with a Polish family, named Yanacheck, in their farmhouse. They hid, fed and protected her in the barn until it was too cold, and then in their home.

"One day in the spring of 1943, the Ukrainians decided they wanted their own independent country. The Jews had been driven out, and now they wanted the Polish people killed as well. News spread that they were burning all the Polish farms in the region and killing their inhabitants with knives and hatchets. I didn’t become aware of this until one morning, when I awoke to the sound of the Yanachecks packing in a hurry to leave their farm. When I asked what was going on, Mrs. Yanacheck tearfully explained everything.

"“We’re going to Germany,” she finally said. “We’re right along the border already—I think we can do it. You better come along too!”"

She got separated from them during the journey, but was treated kindly by other strangers, and sent to work at a farmhouse, where she learned milking and other things. Due to her blue eyes and blond hair, she was taken to be Polish. But then, one day as Easter approached, a co-worker asked her if she'd been to confession, and she responded incorrectly due to her exhaustion so her identity was exposed; she left the farm telling the woman she was returning to Sarny where her family owned a house.

The Yanacheck family had a relative,Anna Kopera, who was her age and who'd died along with her family in the war, so they'd said they'd tell everyone she was Anna Kopera. So Beatrice assumed that identity and got work in Germany, and asked to work in kitchen, was sent to a resort for German soldiers at Tegernsee. She found a friend, another girl her age, Valla, and later they left for Vienna, Valla assuring her it was a nicer place.

They worked in a restaurant in Vienna, but the bombing raids were frightening. They went on to a mess at a training facility for youth, but war came to them, from east, and they returned to Vienna working at a hospital. Valla returned home, and Beatrice stayed on. She was with the hospital, which had moved to Hungary, when liberation came. After that the hospital moved to Budapest, and then to Romania. There, for the first time after years, she met other Jews.

"I was recommended to a little shoe shop, where I instantly noticed the shoemaker and his family were Jewish. As I waited, they confirmed my suspicions by speaking Yiddish to each other.

"“I hope you aren’t going to say anything about me,” I said in Russian, giving them a smile. “I can understand every word you’re saying.”

"They froze, staring at me and narrowing their eyes a little. “How?” they asked.

"“I’m Jewish.” A shiver crept up my spine as I realized that this was the first time I’d said outright that I was Jewish since my childhood.

"They didn’t believe me, mainly because I didn’t look the part. They began to speak to me in Yiddish, and I realized that I couldn’t even utter a word in reply. So many years of using Russian, Polish, and German had erased my memories of Yiddish.

"“She must have worked for a Jewish family and picked up a few words,” the shoemaker’s helper, a young man, said in Yiddish.

"The shoemaker nodded. “There isn’t any way she’s Jewish.”

"He strode over to the window and picked up a Romanian paper, handing it to me and pointing out a block of text in Hebrew.

"“I can read that,” I said, and read the entire thing in Hebrew. I hadn’t spoken it in so long, yet I remembered every word and pronunciation.

"“You are blood!” They started kissing me and hugging me, already talking about how they were going to help me find a choisen, a groom, that evening.

"True to their word, they took me to another shoemaker’s place that night and ....

Merged review:

The book is from compilation of transcripts of interviews that the author's grandmother gave to various people and organisations, including some ten hours of interviews with the author over several days in 2016.

"“In every generation, each person is obligated to view for themselves as if they had been there and left Egypt.”

"In other words, we are required to put ourselves in the Exodus narrative and try to imagine that we, as individuals, were witnesses to the slavery of our people and their eventual deliverance out of Egypt to the promised land of Israel. The following memoir entailed a long, complex process, but I like to think that the words in this memoir of the matriarch of my family serve as our own sort of Haggadah. While it’s a telling of a story not two-thousand years old, but a mere seventy-five years old, because of my grandmother’s survival, we are here today. Because of her, we are a family bound by our connection to this remarkable story of hope, luck, and faith."

"To find more answers, I contacted the International Tracing Service and found documents of my grandmother’s time in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany after the war. I also came across her listing on the ship manifest when she and her family came to America in 1949 and dug into the family tree, coming across cousins from both Bea’s maternal and paternal lineage. Perhaps most interestingly, I discovered that my grandmother’s first cousin, Ida Rosenblum, who is only six months younger than she is, lives in the building next door to her. Due to a family misunderstanding, they did not know each other, despite raising their families less than a mile from one another. I think, therefore, that it is important to recognize the deep wounds the Holocaust created and that, even seventy-five years later, some of these small fragments of shattered families are only now being pieced back together.

"In August of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel with my wife to David-Horodok, which is in present-day Belarus, with the David-Horodok organization of Detroit. Together, with other David-Horodok descendants from Detroit and Israel, we walked the cobblestone streets of the town that was once a thriving Jewish community. I found the street on which my grandmother’s house once stood. We walked the seven kilometers to the mass grave where Bea’s brother and father most likely remain, and later journeyed to Sarny, which is today across the border in the Ukraine. Grandma and her mother walked this 100-kilometer journey together in August of 1941.

"There, on the outskirts of town, are three large mounds of earth—the three mass graves in which nearly 18,000 Jews were murdered during the liquidation of the Sarny ghetto. This is the resting place of Bea’s mother. Seeing these locations firsthand was a moving and emotional experience and motivated me further to help complete my grandmother’s memoir."
............

"In August of 1941, the German soldiers came into town. Before we fully realized what was happening, the Nazis were in our backyards. Two soldiers stopped my father on the street one day, and one of the soldiers—his name was Karl Ludwig—gave him a pack of cigarettes and the address of his mother in Vienna. “Hitler’s aim is to wipe out all the Jewish people,” he said. “But I feel sorry for your pretty, young daughter. Here is the address of my mother in Vienna. Your daughter should take the train and go there. Don’t tell anyone she is Jewish. My mother will keep her.”

"The six-foot-two soldier continued to call on us for three days, always paying me special attention. He would bring cigarettes for my father each time, along with the same warning for me: “You need to leave. Hitler is coming.”

"On the third day, he called on our house with his helmet under his arm. He’d come to say goodbye to me and my father, but only I was awake. We conversed in German. I didn’t know the language well, but I understood a little bit. “I don’t want to fight,” he said. “But I have an order to move on, so that’s what I have to do.”"

"As my father struggled against his captors, a German soldier put a pistol to his head and shot him in cold blood. I was there when it happened, in the house with my mother. As the shot echoed through the town, thudding through my ribcage like an irregular heartbeat, I ran out of the house to find my father lying in a pool of blood. It was raining. I’d never seen so much rain in my life. Torrents of water soaked me through and pelted my father’s unmoving body. I began to hemorrhage, throwing up blood as it ran from my mouth and nose at the same time. I couldn’t even scream. I lost my voice, my words, and just kept throwing up. I was in a daze, a nightmare I couldn’t escape."

"It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before the Hordotchukas came by again, triumphant as they began kicking the women, disabled, e

[Patricia (Irishcharmer) Yarian]

Beautiful

It's amazing what lengths some will go thru to harm and hurt others without blinking an eye! All because of a religious belief that does not confirm with theirs! Oh I know, the concentration camps also held others ie: POW's, and the people deemed "unworthy" according to the regime in place!!
While in Germany, my father took us to several of these camps as a history lesson and to impress upon us the horrors of blatant cruelty that 1sick tyrannical leader ordered his Army and the conforming, stalwart followers/believers bestowed upon a group of people who's only crime was their religion! Heartbreaking!!
We all need to need the lesson written within these pages, as well as others stories written by survivors. I have read several! And with each one, the theme of the beginning is the same. The leader of the country they are in, woo's them into complacency to the point that no voices are heard-except for those in the inner circle of power, and surround themselves with those of the "mob/thug" mentality to help bring people to their knees and confirm and to do the bidding of the leader. It only took just over 2yrs for the Holocaust to start -1933 (the brain/idea began in 1931 but the instigator had to wait until he had a position of power)
We should all pay need to subtle warnings occurring in today's realm-this can happen again-if we as a nation don't play close attention!
Please read t The book and any others you may find! Very

[Carolyn Scarcella]

What an interesting book title is called “Hiding in Plain Sight”, a Holocaust survivor Basia (Beatrice) writes her story, she witnessed and experienced, the ultimate horrors she went through many hiding places, changing her identity, and hiding her faith. This book is short, but an eye-opening page turning, difficult to put down as a result. I must say it is inspiring because she was all alone and facing grave dangers she managed to escape the Nazis and gain freedom. The photographs at the conclusion of the narrative helped put locations and certain events into perspective. The story unfolds, she was born in 1924, growing up in a small town called David-Horodok, a village in eastern Poland. She spent her childhood in a religious family traditions, that follows Jewish education. When her world turned upside in 1941, between the Germans and Ukrainians invaded her hometown. As a result, she promised her parents, she will leave a wonderful legacy, that would make her parents proud. America, freedom.

[Rhonda Johnson]

This was a quick read on the life of a Jewish survivor during the war. I for one love to read as many individual stories I can and never tire of them because they all deserve to be told and heard. We tend to lump all the victims into one category as survivors, but they all have their unique stories and circumstances with heroic perseverance to share. This is a straight forward book of her life spanning from just before the war until the present. It reads well, much like a diary, without too much veering off from her own past.

[JIM ELLIOT]

The book is full of history in Poland and beyond. Beatrice had to endure and lost those dear to her. Some how she was able to survive and make lemonade out of lemons! She is remarkable human being . Let us not forget all those who gave their lives especially in these times in the U.S. We don't need or want to go this atrocity again ever!!

I definitely recommend this book to any and everyone who is interested in World War II and the Holocaust .

[Selina]

While I can have some appreciation for what David Salama was trying to accomplish, i find this truncated memoir upsetting.
WHERE IS THE ORIGINAL BOOK BY BEATRICE SONDERS? The several hundred page version I had the pleasure of reading just 3 years ago? It was filled with detail and triumph, and now I can’t find it anywhere.
Instead we are left with this watered down version that (sorry, David) is a disgrace and a dishonor to Beatrice.
BRING BACK THE ORIGINAL!

[Sharon Jones]

A heart wrenching story but not written by anyone who is destined to be a writer. It was told by the author (although one chapter was someone else's story and no clear transition to that and back to the original story teller. It got its point across but if they wanted to make sure people would want to read this story to get a grasp of the suffering, they should have had it written by someone who has established a place in the literary world, not by a "writer."

[Gina]

A short story of a teenage girl in Belarus when WWII began and the impact it had on her and her family. The story is written on less than 90 pages within the book and several other pages have photos of documents, photos and maps. The chapters are short so easy to read in that respect. Not a great deal of detail in the telling of the story makes it seem flat, though it is always nice to read of someone having a happy life after living through such tragedy.

[Susann]

Interesting

Another amazing take of survival during the Holocaust. Out of so many lost, the author somehow managed with luck, wits, physical stamina, determination, and intelligence to withstand the rigors and horrors of her story. I appreciated the nonemotional, logical narrative which flowed well without becoming maudlin. Thank you.

[Nancy]

Surviving Hell on Earth!

Everyone needs to read this book. How anyone survived the atrocities of Hitler's maniacal evils is nothing short of a miracle of our loving and omnipotent Heavenly Father! We must never forget! We must never repeat these darkest days of humanity's existence!

[Etta]

Hiding in plain Sight....

This was a first person story which tends to be my favorite type of story. The photographs at the conclusion of the narrative helped put locations and certain events into perspective. Thankfully this brave lady was spared the atrocities by the Nazi. Unfortunately, many in her family were not so fortunate.

[Sue]

Very short memoir, telling Beatrice's story of survival and eventual success in America. At the beginning of the book she says she cannot forgive those who perpetrated the Jewish suffering, but I was thankful she did not dwell on that but was, despite so many odds, able to build a satisfying and apparently happy life in Amer without bitterness.

[Karen Campbell]

In this current situation of dealing with the Covid 19 virus and how its changed our lives I got just the tiniest glimpse of what it is like to be restricted in how we live our daily lives. The strength Basia had to live through the dangers she faced reminds me how weak I really am. What a heritage of courage and endurance her following generations have inherited.

[Doris Ayres]

A great book told from one who lived through it. We will never know what they went through unless we know them personally or read their stories. We need to do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately I believe there are children in Ukraine being taken from their families during this war. We must stop it!

[Julie Eister]

Wonderfully told story of survival, love, faith and family

Nice story about a women's survival as a young Jewish girl. It is a nice read. The photos were a great way to invite readers into her life.

[Bkk]

Fascinating story of survival.

Writing could be better but I'm so glad survivors are telling their story in their voice. A quick read- good to know but pray God it never happens again.

[Tracy Fahs]

Could have been great

As a holocaust survival story, this book was short on details and descriptions of how she survived in plain sight. It seemed to gloss over huge chunks of time. It is written like a first person essay for a class, not a novel.

[rachael arrants]

An unbelievable story of an amazing woman and her journey

Omg This woman is amazing!! What she went through in her life should show us all how grateful we should be everyday for our freedom our homes and our family.What a brave girl turned into an amazing strong woman.

[Althea Lefeber]

Survival

I really liked this book it gave me a woman's point of vielw of her being a Jew during the war I really could understand what she went through to survive I would read it again

[Kellyann]

A touching and memorable story , one that I enjoyed immensely. Beatrice Sonders like so many other survivors is a true hero and survivor. I am so appreciative that her story was shared so that future generations may never forget.