The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust

by Marione Ingram

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor.  This is her story. As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. Marione’s mother attempted suicide after receiving a deportation notice—Marione revived her, but then the bombs started to fall, as the Allies leveled the city in eight straight days of bombings. Somehow Marione and her mother and sister survived the devastating firestorms—more than 40,000 perished, and almost the same numbered were wounded.

Marione and her family miraculously escaped and sought shelter with a contact in the countryside who grudgingly agreed to house them in a shed for more than a year. With the war drawing to a close, they went west, back to Hamburg.  There they encountered Allied troops, who reinstalled the local government (made up of ex-Nazis) in order to keep order in the country. Life took on the air of what it used to be. Jews were still second-class citizens.

Marione eventually took shelter at a children’s home in a mansion once owned by wealthy Jewish bankers. There she met Uri, a troubled orphan and another one of the “Children of Blankenese.” Uri’s story, a bleak tale of life in the concentration camps, explores a different side of the Nazi terror in Germany.

In this stirring account of World War II through the eyes of a child, the author’s eloquent narrative elicits compassion from readers. 

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

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

Marione Ingram is a German-born civil rights activist, Holocaust survivor, author and artist

Reviews

[Charles Weinblatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hands of War:
A Tale of Endurance and Hope from a Survivor of the Holocaust
By Marione Ingram
Skyhorse Publishing
March 6, 2013
ISBN-10: 1620871858
ISBN-13: 978-1-62087-185-0
160 pages
Genre: History, Memoir, Jewish, Holocaust
tergas@skyhorsepublishing.com
Publicist – Talia Ergas, (212) 643-6816 x 234
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
Forward by Keith Lowe
Jacket design by Brian Peterson

Reviewed by Charles S. Weinblatt

Marione Ingram is a writer, artist and civil rights advocate who survived the Holocaust and the massive bombing of Hamburg, Germany during World War II. She immigrated to The United States and, having experienced racial discrimination in Europe, became engaged in the civil rights movement. Excerpts of her work have been published in The Best American Essays of 2007 anthology, Granta, and Women Writers: A Zine. She resides with her husband Daniel in Washington DC.

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. This inspiring account of World War II is seen through the eyes of a Jewish child. It allows the reader to experience the degradation of being a “sub-human” and the terror of a massive bombing campaign that flattened the city, creating raging fires that sucked the air out of the lungs of those trapped there. More than 40,000 civilians perished in the Hamburg bombing campaign and almost the same numbered were wounded. The trauma resulting from this experience would haunt Ingram’s life thereafter, as would the nightmare of being a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Marione grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. She revived her mother from a suicide attempt when the family was assigned for deportation to a Nazi concentration or death camp. Then the bombs began to fall, as the Allies leveled Hamburg in eight straight days of carpet bombing. Marione and her mother barely survived the devastating firestorms and then the effects of starvation, until Nazi Germany fell. Ironically, the Allied bombing prevented Marione and her mother from being deported to a Nazi death camp, as their names were on the deportation list for the next train.

Marione eventually took shelter at a children’s home in a mansion once owned by wealthy Jewish bankers. This mansion was turned into a school and campus for Jewish survivors. It became known as the “Children of Blankenese.” There she met Uri, a troubled Jewish orphan who over a period of many months, revealed the terror, starvation, slavery and brutality of Auschwitz to Marione. Uri’s horrific story, illuminating the daily terror of life as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, reveals the abject dread in store for all Jewish prisoners.

Ingram’s writing style is calculated, coherent and convincing. Her memoir is extremely well developed, well-researched and it is delivered with vivid and animated descriptions. She induces a depth of passion into her childhood, lacking in many memoirs. Ingram as a child was a captivating and powerful personality, far above her age in terms of insight and empathy. The reader can clearly feel her compassion and defiance, as well as her enthusiasm for life and the love she holds for her parents. The reader senses equally powerful features for Uri, the lad with which she was enamored at Blankenese. In this respect, the author presents a depth of character development often more attuned to a novel than a memoir.

The Hands of War is greatly enhanced by at least 60 pictures, dating from Ingram’s birth, throughout the Holocaust and as a displaced person after the war. It is astounding that the author was able to acquire so much of her childhood in pictures, including photos of Hamburg captured during and shortly after the Allied carpet bombing. We not only see pictures of her family; we also see her neighborhood as an empty, burning shell after the bombings. These pictures embellish the fine text with enhanced profundity. Liberally sprinkled throughout the book, they enable the reader to sense the terror of the Hamburg bombing campaign, the nightmare of its survivors and the love of family for each other before the Holocaust.

The author eventually settles and marries in The United States, where she joins the civil rights movement of the 1960s. More than 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, Ingram is able to look back into her past and generate a stirring memoir, filled with destruction and death; then revived by hopes and dreams for civil rights in America.

Reviewer Charles S. Weinblatt is the author of the popular Holocaust novel Jacob’s Courage: A Holocaust Love Story (Mazo Publishers 2007).

[Chelsea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will quote two comments by the author from her story:

"Nonviolent resistance [in the civil rights movement] had replaced the helpless rage I had felt as a child [in the Holocaust], and at the same time it had vindicated my painfully acquired belief in viable alternatives to the hands of war."

"[My father] believed and taught me to believe, that it was our duty to expose what had been done and do our best to discourage repetitions."

Many of us have had our share of non-rectified injustices in our lives - rape, sexual abuse, emotional terror, physical torture, war and its aftermath, robbery and losing everything, unfaithful spouses, deep loneliness when others do not believe our stories, and so on. Many times there are no ways to make it right, correct the wrong, get our justice in a direct way.

Reading this powerful story reminded me that there are other very powerful ways of not just healing the helpless rage that she talks about in our own lives but making a significant and lasting difference in the lives of others.

Thank you, Mrs. Ingram, for the courage to not just survive the terror but also make a difference, a healing difference, in my life.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding and inspiring. The author was a Jewish child caught up in Hitler's war - this is a remarkably clear-eyed recounting of her experiences throughout and after that time, seen from much later in her life. Ms. Ingram not only survived, she overcame.
Her narrative is vivid and shows the ugliness of some people's natures and the courage and generosity of others. A valuable addition to the history of that time and place.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short, harrowing account about the horrors the author saw and experienced during WWII as a child, narrowly surviving waves of Nazi extermination campaigns and using the Hamburg firebombing as a means of escape. The scenes Ingram describes are truly incredible and gut-wrenching. She includes another Holocaust survivor's story through concentration camps and a slave factory run by Krupp, which was an important addition.

Learning about Ingram's life after the war is interesting, though she doesn't detail much as that isn't the focus of the story she's telling. Reading about her interest in Zionism change to refusal is a perspective that more people should consider, especially those who don't like seeing bloodshed.

[Emily Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Jewish survivor of the firestorm of Hamburg after intense Allied bombing recounts her memories of changes leading up to, throughout, and following the war. As she grew up in Germany, she offers a different perspective on attitudes of anti-semitism from not only Nazi supporters but also Allied troops and others. It is short and as factual as 70 year old memories allow. She does say many of the most intense parts of her story she recorded while they were still being relived nightly in her nightmares.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just another survivor story.
This is a first person account from a child survivor of Operation Gomorrah, of years if hiding, and of years in the camps. It is horrifying, articulate, and gripping. It will inspire you to breathe out, "never again." It will challenge you to put the book down, get out of your chair and act.

[Bonnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book written by a Jewish woman who was a child in Hamburg during WWII. Her German father was in the Luftwaffe and she and her mother went through the Allies' bombing of Hamburg.

[Willie. Van Den Hoek · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very different but moving book of war time in Germany.

The life story of a jewish girl as she recalls all the events that happened during tbe war. Very realistic and it gives an inside story how life really was. Very well written and true to life.

[Kellyann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant retelling of the awful avents that took place , well written an yet another important account of the tragedies that took place during the holocaust and yet more lives that suffered during this despicable time in history.

[Judith M. rodgrs · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for everyone!

Well written. May we all say, " Never Again! " I could not put the book down...read it all in one day.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a hard time staying interested.. Very drug out... I usually like to read these kinds of books, but I didn't like this one... This is my opinion..

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible

The history is overwhelming. Thank you to the author who shared her background in this book. It is well written, and incredibly true.

[george garwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read

Gh. Gh gh h hh h. H. B h h b h b BBC gh v b b b vb h

[Rainbowgardener · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of a weak four stars. I have read a lot of Holocaust remembrances. This one isn't as beautifully told as some. It starts during the ten day firestorm bombing of Hamburg in 1942, when the author was eight years old. The book was published in 2013, 71 years later. Yet the àuthor goes through the bombing day by day, which neighborhoods were bombed which days by which planes, which set of air raid sirens went off when. Apparently there was a code, of how long thegg5 lasted, how close together they came, etc that conveyed information about how much time before the bombers arrived. But it makes no sense to me that this eight year old girl remembered all this detail, which bomb shelter they tried to get into which day, which days they tried to get to where a relative was keeping her baby sister from which direction and why they couldn't get through. That has to be research, not memory.

And then there are the pictures. Here's a picture of what our apartment building looked like after the bombing. Here's one of what the courtyard looked like after the bombing, filled with rubble. All pictures back then were film, which had to be developed. If you were a professional photographer, you might have your own darkroom set up. Most people took their film somewhere to be developed and then picked the pictures up a few days or a week later. So in a city that was completely destroyed by bombing, who was still developing film. When they couldn't even get to the baby sister, no matter how desperately they tried, they got to the film developing place to drop the film off and again to pick it up? Or maybe the film just stayed in the camera and was developed years later? So over and over again the author and her mom fled the bombings and/ or the threat of being reported and sent to concentration camps, with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, if that. Several times people had to loan them whatever ill fitting clothing was around. But through all that, through more than a year of living in a farm shed and leaving the shed to stay in a cave whenever the Germans were near, back and forth, they somehow miraculously hung on to that camera full of film? I don't mean to be some conspiracy theorist skeptic (the pictures were faked) , but it seems like she owes us some explanation for how these pictures came to exist. But there is none, they are just dropped in. I know there are few pictures from when I was a child, because a lot of the pictures burned in a fire. This was in sunny Southern Calif in the 1950's, with no war on.
And the memories don't sound like those of an eight year old. They aren't full of terror and confusion. She always knew what was going on, what they were doing and why. They are the memories of someone who was an adult at a time. Which is ok, but again seems to need some explanation.

Incidentally, the thing that kept being in my mind was Ukraine. We are so outraged that the Russians are bombing civilians, targeting residential neighborhoods full of apartment blocks, bombing hospitals. Apparently Americans (and their UK allies) invented that art form. We spent ten days wiping Hamburg off the map, bombing the children's hospitals and everything else. (Not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki where we did the same thing, but much more efficiently.).

Still a devastating read. There's always more to know. One part that hurts so much is that it wasn't just the crazy Nazis. Even after the war is over, the camps closed, there is still so much hatred of the Jews and not only from Germans, but everywhere they went. Never forget! Never again! And yet I see so much of this hatred in our country now, demonizing people, considering them sub human.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book

Different / Interesting take on the Hamburg fire-bombing. The author and her Mother were very lucky to have survived. Word.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of Marione Ingram who grew up in Hamburg, Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany's many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. Other children would taunt her with the suggestion that she would soon be "sent up the chimney". Her mother attempted suicide after receiving a deportation notice. Marione and her family were saved from the Holocaust by sheer luck. A few days before they were to be deported to a concentration camp, the British and American air forces began a bombing campaign that caused enough confusion for her family to slip through the Nazi net. If this was a lucky escape, it did not seem so at the time. The bombing of Hamburg was an extremely traumatic event that turned Marione's entire neighborhood into a furnace.
Marione and her mother and sister miraculously escaped. They saw out the rest of the war in hiding, living in a shack in the woods belonging to one of her father's pre-war Communist friends. The hunger, desperation, and loneliness she experienced during those two years were almost beyond description.
I admired the fortitude that this extraordinary woman has shown by managing to survive those events and having the courage to record them for posterity.

[Elsie]

I wanted to read this book because I've met the author and spoken with her about it. I'm also transcribing her oral history for the JHSGW in Washington DC. This is a Holocaust story written from the perspective of the eight-year old child the author was in 1943. I struggle to find words to describe what she and her family went through during those years. Horrible, devastating, hard-to-believe, inhumane, shocking - I don't know words strong enough. She tells the story of her immediate family and how they survived the war, first by the grace of god - not being killed during the civilian bombing raids (10 days and 10 nights) of Hamburg carried out by the Americans and the British and then by being hidden by a hostile Communist who didn't turn them in but didn't feed them or offer them any comfort. There is no reason they should be alive, but they are.

As with all Holocaust accounts, it is grim reading, however, Marione is a person who had the strength and courage to survive and find her way to a positive path. Her subsequent book, called Hands of Peace, talks about her life as a peace and civil rights activist in this country after the war until this day.

I recommend this to anyone who doesn't want to forget the reality of the evil of the Holocaust.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read about the bombings in Hamburg Germany that killed over 45,000 people durring WW2. Marione's story is one of loss and bravery. I can't imagine the fear and heartache she experienced with her mom when trying to find shelter durring the bombings. The scenes of horrific suffering with the inferno and the phosphorus, even the melting sidewalks, is hard to even picture in my mind. I was shocked to see that even in the midst of total mayhem the German people still wouldn't let Marione and her mother into bomb shelters because they were Jewish. What seemed to be a death sentence was a way of escape, to get out of the city alive just days before they were to be deported to Auschwitz. Marione speaks for the millions that had their lives taken from them. She is proof that suffering exists and that courage is not something your born with but something that is squeezed out of you during times of difficulty.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very engaging true story of a young Jewish girl in Hamburg, Germany, before and during WWII. Even with all the destruction happening around them the Nazis still remained focused on killing as many Jews as they could. After receiving deportation orders to a death camp, she and her mother were saved because of the intense day and night bombing by the allies and the ensuing confusion that allowed them to escape to the country where they hid for the rest of the war. Great read for anyone but particularly those interested in aspects of WWII.

[Halli Casser-Jayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope everyone will read Marione Ingram's The Hands of War. This is as riveting an account of living through the Holocaust as I have ever read. And then listen to my interview with Marione Ingram on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show. Listening to Ms. Ingram read her own words will bring tears to your eyes. But hearing her talk about her experience...your heart will sing for her triumph of good over evil. Listen here and tell me what you think. http://bit.ly/U4EEMd

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine der wenigen Spiegel-Online-Empfehlungen, die ich auch empfehlen kann. Wobei mir das erste mal ein englisches Buch untergekommen ist. Auf Deutsch wäre es mir in der Tat fast lieber gewesen, aber zugeschlagen hab ich trotzdem.
Ich finde es brilliant geschrieben.
Hier dazu ein Lesebeispiel - auf deutsch bei Spiegel

[Neil Harmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I straightforward and well done account of a young girl who managed to escape deportation in Nazi Germany. A good account of the difficulties and successes as well as surviving the 'round the clock bombing of Hamburg. This also includes some information from people the author met along the way that details the Krupp company's slave labor program. I listened to the Audible version which was well done.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Account of the author’s childhood experiences during the Hamburg bombings during WWII.

This book is graphic and not for young readers. War is a desperately ugly and brutal thing. This is the first time I’d read about operation Gomorrah. I think the stolpersteine or stumble stones were a touching tribute to the Jews who lost their lives.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find it difficult to breathe reading survivor experiences of the Holocaust. Murders in the millions, broken down family by family with hearts torn by both knowing and not knowing...How moving that she continued to fight for racial & ethnic equality even after moving to America!

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great and compelling read from start to finish.

[Robert Kradoska · Rating 3 out of 5]

a holocaust survivor

[Bev Walkling · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a short or easy read. It could be, but if it is then you missed the point. Not your typical "survivor" memoir. Please read.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is always more to learn about the Holocaust. A very good book.

[Dj Angle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read. Detail of personal experiences.