Review Detail

What worked: This haunting memoir is about two young sisters who helped each other survive the Holocaust. Both of the girls parents are deaf. So is Herta. Renee is the one who helps her family know whenever the Nazis are close by. Their parents end up sending the girls to a farm in the hopes to hide them from the Nazis. The girls are sent back when there is no word from the parents. When the sisters are back in Bratislava, they find out that their parents were sent to a concentration camp. Later they are sent to join them.

What makes this memoir powerful is it's told in an oral history format. Readers can feel the loneliness, horror, that the sisters must have felt during this time. The memoir also personalizes what it must have been like to be a child witnessing and experiencing the horror of the Holocaust. The strength of this book has to be the power of the love of these two sisters that helps them survive through a dark time in history.

There's also photographs at the end of the book that show both sisters and the concentration camp they were liberated from.

Riveting memoir of two sisters who survived the Holocaust. I feel this book would be a perfect addition to elementary and middle school libraries.