Remembering Ravensbrück

In her luminous and engrossing memoir, Natalie B. Hess takes us from a sheltered childhood in a small town in Poland into the horrors of the Holocaust. When her parents are rounded up and perish in the Treblinka concentration camp, a Gentile family temporarily hides six-year-old Natalia. Later, protected by a family friend, she is imprisoned in her city's ghetto, before she is sent to a forced-labor camp, and finally, Ravensbr ck Concentration Camp, from which, at nine, she is liberated. Taken to Sweden, by the Swedish White Cross busses, she adapts to and grows to love her new home, becoming a 'proper Swedish School girl', until, at sixteen, she is claimed by relatives and uprooted to Evansville, Indiana. There, she must start over yet again, mastering English, and ultimately earning a PhD in literature. As a married young mother, she and her husband move to Jerusalem where they and their three children experience life as Israelis, including the bombing of their home during the Six