The Girl from Sighet: A Memoir

by Hindi Rothbart

Hindi Rothbart with P'nenah Goldstein

272 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2009

Reviews

[Patti Townley-Covert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish everyone who doubts the Holocaust could read this book. Mrs. Rothart was my neighbor and I'd heard about her tattoo and had friends that had heard her speak, but I never did. This book is a compelling read and smacks of authenticity. No one could make up such human cruelty and to survive it without becoming cruel makes her a true hero--one our world needs to be aware of. Books like this can refute the lies that come over time.

[andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1944, Hindi Friedman's idyllic childhood in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains abruptly ended when German troops invaded her beloved hometown of Sighet. This memoir, written in the style of a novel, chronicles Hindi and her family's confinement in the town's ghetto, their transport in a suffocating cattlecar to Auschwitz, and the subsequent heroic struggle to survive the inhumane conditions of the concentration camp.

After Russian soldiers liberated Hindi and her sister from a labor camp in the Czech Republic, the young girls immediately faced a harsh new reality. Their liberators were now the enemy. Weak and hungry, the girls escape by foot over the Czech mountains to avoid the savagery of the Russian soldiers. Two years after the war ended, Hindi was again on the run. Trapped in communist Romania, she escaped into Austria and eventually to her new home in America.

This epic memoir spans seventy years, transporting the reader from shtetl life through war-torn Europe to the American suburbs of the fifties and on to the present, allowing us to partake in a remarkable journey from death and despair to hope and rebirth.