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Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors
The story of the generation of hidden child survivors told through the true experiences of three Jewish girls—from Poland, Holland, and France—who transcended their traumatic childhoods to lead remarkable lives in America.
Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.
Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In braiding the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be “such good girls,” Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation—the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he recreates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up “hiding places” and finally brought them together.
Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.
Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In braiding the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be “such good girls,” Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation—the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he recreates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up “hiding places” and finally brought them together.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published September 9, 2014
802 people are currently reading
5902 people want to read
About the author
R.D. Rosen
20 books32 followersRichard Dean Rosen's writing career spans mystery novels, narrative nonfiction, humor books, and television. Strike Three You're Dead (1984), the first in Rosen's series featuring major league baseball player Harvey Blissberg, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America in 1985. Blissberg's adventures continued in four sequels, including Fadeaway (1986) and Saturday Night Dead (1988), which drew on Rosen's stint as a writer for Saturday Night Live.
Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.
Rosen's three nonfiction books include Psychobabble (1979), inspired by the term he coined, and A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West (2007). Over the past decade, he co-created and co-wrote a bestselling series of humor books: Bad Cat, Bad Dog, Bad Baby, and Bad President.
He attended Brown University and graduated from Harvard College.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 215 reviews
October 17, 2014
This book follows the lives of three of the hidden children during the holocaust, one hidden with her mother using forged papers and passing as Catholic. The other two in different and sometimes worse situations.
Some would not learn they were Jewish until they were grown and had trouble accepting the truth.
Although I have read many books fiction and non about the holocaust I never really thought about those that had survived because they were hidden, raised by other families or just sheltered by those who did not agree with the Nazi solution. The author does a good job presenting these cases and goes on to examine the guilt many of them have for surviving when so many of their family members did not.
I also learned a few things I had never known: Belgium sheltered over 4000 Jewish people and the Dutch had the greatest percentage of Jews lost. The bravery of all involved is considerable and I am in awe of their courage and sacrifice. If only more had felt this way.
ARC from Netgalley.
Some would not learn they were Jewish until they were grown and had trouble accepting the truth.
Although I have read many books fiction and non about the holocaust I never really thought about those that had survived because they were hidden, raised by other families or just sheltered by those who did not agree with the Nazi solution. The author does a good job presenting these cases and goes on to examine the guilt many of them have for surviving when so many of their family members did not.
I also learned a few things I had never known: Belgium sheltered over 4000 Jewish people and the Dutch had the greatest percentage of Jews lost. The bravery of all involved is considerable and I am in awe of their courage and sacrifice. If only more had felt this way.
ARC from Netgalley.
August 26, 2014
These real-life stories are absolutely fascinating!
This is truly a fascinating story of three women who survived the holocaust and lived to tell their stories. The author coins the phrase "Such good girls," to describe these women who were brave enough to live through one of the greatest genocide that ever occurred in modern civilization and tell the rest of the world what happened during the reign the Third Reich. Sophie Turner was raised by a Catholic family to protect her Jewish identity; Flora Hogman was also protected and raised by several members of Christian faith, and Carla Lessing struggled to live through the war and atrocities of gestapo with her family concealed by Dutch strangers when Holland was under occupation. All the three women grew up under terror, later migrated to United States and excelled in education and in their field of study to help the hidden child survivors. Finally it looked like the American dream came true, but it was built on the foundation of nightmares, tragedies and un-healing wounds. This book tries to re-create the event that took place, and as seen through the eyes young women who did not know that there is such an evil that lurks in this world.
Sophie, born as Selma Schwarzland in Lvov, Poland, lived in the Polish ghetto before escaping with her mother has the most vivid and frightening experience of the three women. She lived through scenarios where German shot and killed almost 5,000 Jews who were sick and elderly on Janowska Street in Lvov ghetto. 15,000 more Jews sent on their way to Belzec not far from Lvov for extermination. In the following few week almost 150,000 women, children and elderly lost their lives. Sophie under the constant protection of her mother lived with the imminent threat of death, and despaired to understand the cruelty perpetrated in the name of ethnic cleansing.
Over the years I have read many news stories and editorials about the struggle of Jews in German occupied Europe and this is one of the best books I have read and it is truly fascinating. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history and the survival of Jewish people, especially children.
This is truly a fascinating story of three women who survived the holocaust and lived to tell their stories. The author coins the phrase "Such good girls," to describe these women who were brave enough to live through one of the greatest genocide that ever occurred in modern civilization and tell the rest of the world what happened during the reign the Third Reich. Sophie Turner was raised by a Catholic family to protect her Jewish identity; Flora Hogman was also protected and raised by several members of Christian faith, and Carla Lessing struggled to live through the war and atrocities of gestapo with her family concealed by Dutch strangers when Holland was under occupation. All the three women grew up under terror, later migrated to United States and excelled in education and in their field of study to help the hidden child survivors. Finally it looked like the American dream came true, but it was built on the foundation of nightmares, tragedies and un-healing wounds. This book tries to re-create the event that took place, and as seen through the eyes young women who did not know that there is such an evil that lurks in this world.
Sophie, born as Selma Schwarzland in Lvov, Poland, lived in the Polish ghetto before escaping with her mother has the most vivid and frightening experience of the three women. She lived through scenarios where German shot and killed almost 5,000 Jews who were sick and elderly on Janowska Street in Lvov ghetto. 15,000 more Jews sent on their way to Belzec not far from Lvov for extermination. In the following few week almost 150,000 women, children and elderly lost their lives. Sophie under the constant protection of her mother lived with the imminent threat of death, and despaired to understand the cruelty perpetrated in the name of ethnic cleansing.
Over the years I have read many news stories and editorials about the struggle of Jews in German occupied Europe and this is one of the best books I have read and it is truly fascinating. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history and the survival of Jewish people, especially children.
September 6, 2014
Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust's Hidden Child Survivors by R. D. Rosen is a very highly recommended nonfiction account of several hidden child survivors of the holocaust.
Most people know of Anne Frank, a child hidden for most of WWII who did not survive, but there were other Jewish children who were hidden and survived the Holocaust. In Such Good Girls R. D. Rosen shares the stories of three woman who survived the holocaust by hiding and how it affected their lives. The book is divided into two parts. The first tells the individual stories of the three girls, one Polish, one French, and one Dutch, and what they had to do and endure in order to survive. The second half of the book explores the lingering effects their childhood trauma has had on them as adults. The Hidden Child Survivors have been meeting since the 1980s and sharing their stories to add to the Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The numerous name changes, constant relocation and moving, the loss of family, heritage and personal identity are all heart breaking. The children may have survived the war, but at a great cost. This is not an exhausting, scholarly account of all the stories, but a selection of three that should highlight the fact that others also endured and were traumatized. Sharing and allowing these stories to reach a wider audience will shed light on a group of survivors that have been neglected in the past.
While this is not an emotionally easy book to read, the information it contains is necessary for us to always keep in mind that this must never happen again, although I know that it is, to other groups of people throughout the world. The book includes 16 pages of pictures, a bibliography, and list of documentaries and films.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.
Most people know of Anne Frank, a child hidden for most of WWII who did not survive, but there were other Jewish children who were hidden and survived the Holocaust. In Such Good Girls R. D. Rosen shares the stories of three woman who survived the holocaust by hiding and how it affected their lives. The book is divided into two parts. The first tells the individual stories of the three girls, one Polish, one French, and one Dutch, and what they had to do and endure in order to survive. The second half of the book explores the lingering effects their childhood trauma has had on them as adults. The Hidden Child Survivors have been meeting since the 1980s and sharing their stories to add to the Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The numerous name changes, constant relocation and moving, the loss of family, heritage and personal identity are all heart breaking. The children may have survived the war, but at a great cost. This is not an exhausting, scholarly account of all the stories, but a selection of three that should highlight the fact that others also endured and were traumatized. Sharing and allowing these stories to reach a wider audience will shed light on a group of survivors that have been neglected in the past.
While this is not an emotionally easy book to read, the information it contains is necessary for us to always keep in mind that this must never happen again, although I know that it is, to other groups of people throughout the world. The book includes 16 pages of pictures, a bibliography, and list of documentaries and films.
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.
December 12, 2019
Powerful! A group of survivors that I knew nothing about... for good reason, actually. What a lifetime bind these poor people are in and little the rest of us knew. My heart aches. Incredibly well done!
Read
July 14, 20247/14- keeping my habit to not give holocaust stories star ratings. But it’s a fresh perspective. At first I just wasn’t paying attention and the break in families and the various members threw me, but it was quickly clarified. To be able to follow the various POVs throughout and not from the trenches and camps but from hiding. I’ve never read a book on this subject that’s been able to do this especially back four generations at some points.
I’m not stupid. I know I can set font size to my liking, but for whatever reason when I try to set it a tad larger my eyes just cannot deal with it. I’m probably dying. Anyway I’ve kept it small, which is the size it opened as when I bought it. So I feel like I’m reading tons and so much emotion oh my and then I look and I’ve jumped 5%. But this story is unique. For anyone who is historically minded, but may not want an actual Holocaust story from the camps, I’d suggest this book. It’s from a child’s perspective. Couple of meaningful quotes I’ll post later.
I’m not stupid. I know I can set font size to my liking, but for whatever reason when I try to set it a tad larger my eyes just cannot deal with it. I’m probably dying. Anyway I’ve kept it small, which is the size it opened as when I bought it. So I feel like I’m reading tons and so much emotion oh my and then I look and I’ve jumped 5%. But this story is unique. For anyone who is historically minded, but may not want an actual Holocaust story from the camps, I’d suggest this book. It’s from a child’s perspective. Couple of meaningful quotes I’ll post later.
December 10, 2015
This book will break your heart. It is a narrative of the lives of the "hidden children" of the Holocaust as told through the individual stories of three of them.
These children were sequestered at the homes of mostly Christians (and not just Christians, but Righteous among the Nations Christians) for several years in Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany during the Holocaust. During this period, their parents instructed them never to mention that they were Jewish, and in one case, the mother drilled her daughter on the catechism so she could pass for Roman Catholic.
The strategy was successful in that they all survived the Holocaust, but problematic in that they didn't know they were Jewish or what a Jew was. They ended up in the U.S. with vague ideas of what being Jewish meant, and mostly they avoided the subject altogether. One of them decided while she was in hiding that there WAS no God, because a just and loving God wouldn't have put them in the position. The one who drilled her daughter on the catechism allowed her to have a first communion, and the daughter actually became anti-Semitic. It took her years in the U.S. to reconcile herself to her actual Jewishness.
Another child that one of the three women remembered had a fabulous memory and memorized the Roman Catholic liturgy to the point that a Catholic prelate decided he was the Jewish orphan who would become the next pope. In another case, one child actually became an archbishop, and then when he found out he was Jew, wore both a cassock and a yarmulke simultaneously.
Readjustment in America was difficult for the great majority of the children. One woman only picked the fruit at the top of the pile in a grocery store, because she was so horrified of the very idea of "selection."
Most of the hidden children had a huge revelation at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II, when a vast number of them came together and met, all of them understanding--even without speaking--what all the others had been through.
This book takes the reader through the horror and hope of the whole phenomenon. It should be required reading for everyone, especially gentiles.
These children were sequestered at the homes of mostly Christians (and not just Christians, but Righteous among the Nations Christians) for several years in Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany during the Holocaust. During this period, their parents instructed them never to mention that they were Jewish, and in one case, the mother drilled her daughter on the catechism so she could pass for Roman Catholic.
The strategy was successful in that they all survived the Holocaust, but problematic in that they didn't know they were Jewish or what a Jew was. They ended up in the U.S. with vague ideas of what being Jewish meant, and mostly they avoided the subject altogether. One of them decided while she was in hiding that there WAS no God, because a just and loving God wouldn't have put them in the position. The one who drilled her daughter on the catechism allowed her to have a first communion, and the daughter actually became anti-Semitic. It took her years in the U.S. to reconcile herself to her actual Jewishness.
Another child that one of the three women remembered had a fabulous memory and memorized the Roman Catholic liturgy to the point that a Catholic prelate decided he was the Jewish orphan who would become the next pope. In another case, one child actually became an archbishop, and then when he found out he was Jew, wore both a cassock and a yarmulke simultaneously.
Readjustment in America was difficult for the great majority of the children. One woman only picked the fruit at the top of the pile in a grocery store, because she was so horrified of the very idea of "selection."
Most of the hidden children had a huge revelation at the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II, when a vast number of them came together and met, all of them understanding--even without speaking--what all the others had been through.
This book takes the reader through the horror and hope of the whole phenomenon. It should be required reading for everyone, especially gentiles.
December 5, 2015
Also on my blog, Luthien Reviews
Oh boy. I really struggled with this book.
First of all, the title—Such Good Girls—is rather misleading. Most of the first third of the book is concerned with the story of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky. The stories of the other titular girls—Flora Hogman and Carla Lessing—have about thirty pages each devoted to them, though Carla shares her space with a fourth “hidden child” survivor: her husband Ed Lessing. Mr. Lessing is, of course, not a girl (good or otherwise); nor are up to half of the other survivors whose stories R.D. Rosen recounts, albeit briefly, later in the book.
“Well that's just stupid and nitpicky,” you say?
Not quite. The inaccurate title belies the unfocused nature of the book as a whole. But I'll get to that.
The author, Mr. Rosen, is Jewish. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but it plainly affected the way he approached the entire subject. He kept trying to make it personal. No offense to him, but it isn't. He makes it quite clear that he and his parents grew up as privileged, comfortable, upper-middle-class Chicagoans with little real awareness of the Holocaust. In fact, before he met Sophie, he admits that he had never even spoken to a Holocaust survivor. Yet because he's Jewish, he claims the Holocaust was “a disaster I hadn't emotionally confronted in my life.”
When I read that line to my dad, he blinked and said, “Have you confronted the Great Famine emotionally?” (My family is half Irish, and it's possible though not at all certain that we had ancestors who perished in the Famine—which itself was arguably genocide and which killed or displaced fully a fourth of the Irish population.)
I think that sentiment sums up my issue with Rosen and his biased approach: the Holocaust was a great tragedy, not only for the minorities the Nazis targeted, but for humanity as a whole. However, that does not mean that it affected Rosen personally.
The actual narratives are harrowing, if somewhat...embellished for my taste. Sophie, then Selma, was a five-year-old living in the Lvov, Poland ghetto when her grandparents and father were killed. Her desperate mother Laura—whose good looks and fluency in German had already allowed her to put off deportation an unbelievable four times—escaped the ghetto with her daughter and sisters. Using false papers, she passed them off as Catholic Poles and went to work for an SS officer. Her daughter spent the next six years as a Catholic girl named Zofia Tymejko, only learning the truth when they fled to England.
Flora Hillel was also five and living in Nice, France, with her mother. When Mrs. Hillel was deported, she sent Flora to a convent to hide. She was then moved three times before finally being adopted by an eccentric Frenchwoman and her Swedish husband.
Carla Heijmans went into hiding with her mother and brother hid at eleven. They lived alongside a Christian family of nine in the Netherlands for three years. Her future husband Ed moved from farm to farm fighting for the Dutch Resistance while his family hid in a small cabin in the woods. His mother was discovered and sent to Bergen-Belsen, but miraculously survived.
There are still more moving anecdotes scattered throughout: a young mother in the Lublin ghetto who begged a Catholic woman to care for her newborn, saying, “You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try and save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe.” A little girl raised from infancy by loving Christian parents, only to be kidnapped at four by her traumatized mother, who had survived Auschwitz, and later abused by her psychotic older sister. The hundreds of children raised by Christian parents with no knowledge of or connection to their now-destroyed biological families.
Yet as terrible and heartbreaking as these stories are, they would have been better-served if Mr. Rosen had told them in a journalistic manner. Instead, he writes like a novelist. I find it strange how many people complained about his “dry” style in their reviews, because to me, he writes quite colorfully—too colorfully. Yes, he interviewed all three women (plus Ed) at length, but nevertheless, these are not his memoirs, and thus he has no way of knowing what their thoughts and feelings really were. Yet he writes as if he does know. He writes without qualifiers (i.e., “she probably felt [x]”). It bothered me.
Moreover, the book just isn't all that well-written. Rosen's style goes abruptly from personal to detached, then becomes suddenly personal again (since he occasionally inserts himself and his experiences). The prose itself is sloppy, repetitive, and poorly-edited in more than a few places.
There are some valuable things to be found in the rest of the book, though. My heart broke reading about the “hierarchy of suffering,” in which “adult survivors…often treated hidden child survivors as the second-class citizens of Holocaust suffering.”
But Such Good Girls is quite short, so Rosen glosses over statements that he should instead expand on, such as the fact that “[a] 2000 study of 170 Holocaust survivors...concluded that survivors hidden by foster families scored significantly higher on several of the measures of distress than survivors of the camps...” What were these measures? How can Rosen just make a throwaway mention of something like that and never return to it? It was endlessly frustrating to me.
He also entertains the idea that the memories of hidden children are partially unreliable due to both their young ages and the nature of memory itself. Yet in spite of the serious memory blocks suffered by two of his subjects (Sophie and Flora) and blatant inccuracies in Flora's account, he ultimately claims that all hidden children's memories should be believed without hesitation or skepticism.
I don't say this to be insensitive, nor do I think that most survivors' accounts are inaccurate. But if you're writing a piece of scholarship based on adults' sixty=year-old memories of their childhoods, you must acknowledge that children are extremely unreliable witnesses and that their memory—more so than that of any other group—is fallible, especially given the desperate straits the hidden children were already in. Scholars can (and ought to) be both sympathetic and skeptical.
That is the nature of the second two-thirds of this book: largely unfocused and vague. Rosen tries to tackle way too much in one volume. What is his thesis, his argument, his “point”? I just don't know.
What frustrated me the most, however, was the way he discussed the hidden children's struggle to reconcile their religious and ethnic identities. He focuses on it specifically in one chapter called “Am I a Christian or a Jew?”, but he spends a good deal of time on the subject throughout the book. This, to me, was where his bias came across most clearly.
To me, Judaism is primarily a religion. (One of my high school history teachers felt very strongly about that.) While I understand that there are ethnic and cultural components to “Jewishness,” I refuse to call Judaism a race. As far as I'm concerned, such language only plays into the kind of antisemitism exploited by the Nazis.
Or maybe I just don't understand since I am not Jewish.
Nevertheless, I was extremely aggravated by the message that kept slipping through in this book: these hidden survivors needed not only to “find” or “reconnect” to their Jewish heritage; not simply to acknowledge that their families were Jewish, but also that THEY, themselves, were Jews (and all that entails); that they needed to become Jewish. After leaving Poland, for instance, Sophie was forced into a Jewish group at school despite still identifying as a Catholic. And this even though her mother, Laura, had been an atheist even before the war:
“Original faith”?! Impoverished, hungry, scared five-year-olds don't have “original faiths,” especially if their parents are atheists! But at eleven or twelve, Sophie was genuinely a Catholic. She had learned the traditions. She went to Mass. She believed in Catholicism.
I am of the opinion that parents should always put the needs and well-being of their children first. That said, though I don't understand why Laura (and so many other Jewish parents) tried to force their by-then-Christian children to accept their “inherent Jewishness” (perhaps to deny Hitler any more victories?), I cannot fault them considering the trauma they had been through. I am, however, critical of the way Rosen writes about it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. If you're born Jewish, he seems to think, then you simply are Jewish. That bothers me in particular—as I see it, everyone ought to choose their faith and their path unburdened by a sense of obligation to parents, family, or “race.”
Rosen must be onto something, though, considering many hidden children—even those who became Catholic priests—felt that they simply “were Jewish” and eventually returned to the faith of their ancestors. Again, maybe me not being Jewish just means I can't understand their mindsets properly.
For all its glaring faults, however, I will say that Such Good Girls puts a lot of things into perspective.
The next time someone on the internet claims they were “triggered” by a picture of food or of a person looking into the camera, I'll remember the woman so traumatized by her experiences at Auschwitz that she cannot “select” vegetables at the supermarket. Or I'll think of Sophie, for whom “sirens, crying babies, stray animals … [and] every separation causes anxiety” and sometimes “hours of anguish.”
I feel bad for being so critical of this book, but I think that Sophie, Flora, and the Lessings would have been better-served by a more neutral and professional writer, perhaps even an actual historian, than by Mr. Rosen. A lot of the disjointed topics he covered—psychological and emotional trauma/PTSD, religious and ethnic identity crises, discrimination by other survivors, sexual abuse by “hiding families,” American perceptions of and reactions to the Holocaust, and more—could and probably should have whole books devoted to them rather than a few pages in a larger work.
Needless to say, it isn't the survivors' stories themselves that I'm giving three stars.
Oh boy. I really struggled with this book.
First of all, the title—Such Good Girls—is rather misleading. Most of the first third of the book is concerned with the story of Sophie Turner-Zaretsky. The stories of the other titular girls—Flora Hogman and Carla Lessing—have about thirty pages each devoted to them, though Carla shares her space with a fourth “hidden child” survivor: her husband Ed Lessing. Mr. Lessing is, of course, not a girl (good or otherwise); nor are up to half of the other survivors whose stories R.D. Rosen recounts, albeit briefly, later in the book.
“Well that's just stupid and nitpicky,” you say?
Not quite. The inaccurate title belies the unfocused nature of the book as a whole. But I'll get to that.
The author, Mr. Rosen, is Jewish. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but it plainly affected the way he approached the entire subject. He kept trying to make it personal. No offense to him, but it isn't. He makes it quite clear that he and his parents grew up as privileged, comfortable, upper-middle-class Chicagoans with little real awareness of the Holocaust. In fact, before he met Sophie, he admits that he had never even spoken to a Holocaust survivor. Yet because he's Jewish, he claims the Holocaust was “a disaster I hadn't emotionally confronted in my life.”
When I read that line to my dad, he blinked and said, “Have you confronted the Great Famine emotionally?” (My family is half Irish, and it's possible though not at all certain that we had ancestors who perished in the Famine—which itself was arguably genocide and which killed or displaced fully a fourth of the Irish population.)
I think that sentiment sums up my issue with Rosen and his biased approach: the Holocaust was a great tragedy, not only for the minorities the Nazis targeted, but for humanity as a whole. However, that does not mean that it affected Rosen personally.
The actual narratives are harrowing, if somewhat...embellished for my taste. Sophie, then Selma, was a five-year-old living in the Lvov, Poland ghetto when her grandparents and father were killed. Her desperate mother Laura—whose good looks and fluency in German had already allowed her to put off deportation an unbelievable four times—escaped the ghetto with her daughter and sisters. Using false papers, she passed them off as Catholic Poles and went to work for an SS officer. Her daughter spent the next six years as a Catholic girl named Zofia Tymejko, only learning the truth when they fled to England.
Flora Hillel was also five and living in Nice, France, with her mother. When Mrs. Hillel was deported, she sent Flora to a convent to hide. She was then moved three times before finally being adopted by an eccentric Frenchwoman and her Swedish husband.
Carla Heijmans went into hiding with her mother and brother hid at eleven. They lived alongside a Christian family of nine in the Netherlands for three years. Her future husband Ed moved from farm to farm fighting for the Dutch Resistance while his family hid in a small cabin in the woods. His mother was discovered and sent to Bergen-Belsen, but miraculously survived.
There are still more moving anecdotes scattered throughout: a young mother in the Lublin ghetto who begged a Catholic woman to care for her newborn, saying, “You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try and save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe.” A little girl raised from infancy by loving Christian parents, only to be kidnapped at four by her traumatized mother, who had survived Auschwitz, and later abused by her psychotic older sister. The hundreds of children raised by Christian parents with no knowledge of or connection to their now-destroyed biological families.
Yet as terrible and heartbreaking as these stories are, they would have been better-served if Mr. Rosen had told them in a journalistic manner. Instead, he writes like a novelist. I find it strange how many people complained about his “dry” style in their reviews, because to me, he writes quite colorfully—too colorfully. Yes, he interviewed all three women (plus Ed) at length, but nevertheless, these are not his memoirs, and thus he has no way of knowing what their thoughts and feelings really were. Yet he writes as if he does know. He writes without qualifiers (i.e., “she probably felt [x]”). It bothered me.
Moreover, the book just isn't all that well-written. Rosen's style goes abruptly from personal to detached, then becomes suddenly personal again (since he occasionally inserts himself and his experiences). The prose itself is sloppy, repetitive, and poorly-edited in more than a few places.
There are some valuable things to be found in the rest of the book, though. My heart broke reading about the “hierarchy of suffering,” in which “adult survivors…often treated hidden child survivors as the second-class citizens of Holocaust suffering.”
But Such Good Girls is quite short, so Rosen glosses over statements that he should instead expand on, such as the fact that “[a] 2000 study of 170 Holocaust survivors...concluded that survivors hidden by foster families scored significantly higher on several of the measures of distress than survivors of the camps...” What were these measures? How can Rosen just make a throwaway mention of something like that and never return to it? It was endlessly frustrating to me.
He also entertains the idea that the memories of hidden children are partially unreliable due to both their young ages and the nature of memory itself. Yet in spite of the serious memory blocks suffered by two of his subjects (Sophie and Flora) and blatant inccuracies in Flora's account, he ultimately claims that all hidden children's memories should be believed without hesitation or skepticism.
I don't say this to be insensitive, nor do I think that most survivors' accounts are inaccurate. But if you're writing a piece of scholarship based on adults' sixty=year-old memories of their childhoods, you must acknowledge that children are extremely unreliable witnesses and that their memory—more so than that of any other group—is fallible, especially given the desperate straits the hidden children were already in. Scholars can (and ought to) be both sympathetic and skeptical.
That is the nature of the second two-thirds of this book: largely unfocused and vague. Rosen tries to tackle way too much in one volume. What is his thesis, his argument, his “point”? I just don't know.
What frustrated me the most, however, was the way he discussed the hidden children's struggle to reconcile their religious and ethnic identities. He focuses on it specifically in one chapter called “Am I a Christian or a Jew?”, but he spends a good deal of time on the subject throughout the book. This, to me, was where his bias came across most clearly.
To me, Judaism is primarily a religion. (One of my high school history teachers felt very strongly about that.) While I understand that there are ethnic and cultural components to “Jewishness,” I refuse to call Judaism a race. As far as I'm concerned, such language only plays into the kind of antisemitism exploited by the Nazis.
Or maybe I just don't understand since I am not Jewish.
Nevertheless, I was extremely aggravated by the message that kept slipping through in this book: these hidden survivors needed not only to “find” or “reconnect” to their Jewish heritage; not simply to acknowledge that their families were Jewish, but also that THEY, themselves, were Jews (and all that entails); that they needed to become Jewish. After leaving Poland, for instance, Sophie was forced into a Jewish group at school despite still identifying as a Catholic. And this even though her mother, Laura, had been an atheist even before the war:
[Laura] felt a strong ethical compulsion to reunite [her daughter Sophie] with her original faith. (65)
“Original faith”?! Impoverished, hungry, scared five-year-olds don't have “original faiths,” especially if their parents are atheists! But at eleven or twelve, Sophie was genuinely a Catholic. She had learned the traditions. She went to Mass. She believed in Catholicism.
I am of the opinion that parents should always put the needs and well-being of their children first. That said, though I don't understand why Laura (and so many other Jewish parents) tried to force their by-then-Christian children to accept their “inherent Jewishness” (perhaps to deny Hitler any more victories?), I cannot fault them considering the trauma they had been through. I am, however, critical of the way Rosen writes about it, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. If you're born Jewish, he seems to think, then you simply are Jewish. That bothers me in particular—as I see it, everyone ought to choose their faith and their path unburdened by a sense of obligation to parents, family, or “race.”
Rosen must be onto something, though, considering many hidden children—even those who became Catholic priests—felt that they simply “were Jewish” and eventually returned to the faith of their ancestors. Again, maybe me not being Jewish just means I can't understand their mindsets properly.
For all its glaring faults, however, I will say that Such Good Girls puts a lot of things into perspective.
The next time someone on the internet claims they were “triggered” by a picture of food or of a person looking into the camera, I'll remember the woman so traumatized by her experiences at Auschwitz that she cannot “select” vegetables at the supermarket. Or I'll think of Sophie, for whom “sirens, crying babies, stray animals … [and] every separation causes anxiety” and sometimes “hours of anguish.”
I feel bad for being so critical of this book, but I think that Sophie, Flora, and the Lessings would have been better-served by a more neutral and professional writer, perhaps even an actual historian, than by Mr. Rosen. A lot of the disjointed topics he covered—psychological and emotional trauma/PTSD, religious and ethnic identity crises, discrimination by other survivors, sexual abuse by “hiding families,” American perceptions of and reactions to the Holocaust, and more—could and probably should have whole books devoted to them rather than a few pages in a larger work.
Needless to say, it isn't the survivors' stories themselves that I'm giving three stars.
August 13, 2014
Today’s post is on Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors by R. D. Rosen. It is 304 pages long including a bibliography, list of documentaries and feature films and is published by HarperCollins. The cover has a picture of a young girl praying in a garden. The intended reader is someone who is interested in Holocaust history. There is some language, talk of rape and sexual abuse, and talk about one of the most horrible times in human history; teens and adults for the best. This story is told from interviews, journals, newspaper articles, and research data. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the back of the book- Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three women.
Sophie Turner-Zaretzky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but later became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In reading the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be “such good girls,” R. D. Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation- the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he re-creates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up “hiding places” and finally brought them together.
Review- This was a fascinating and wonderful read. I truly enjoyed this book. I felt that there was really some hope for both these survivors and others who have had to hide from horrible things in their lives. The three women that the story mostly focus’ on are truly terrifying and amazing. They survived things that no one should ever have to and then they go on to lead lives that help other people. The women talk about how hard it was to move on but they do. They are inspiring. The writing is wonderful, the research is heartbreaking but I felt like I could trust Rosen. He was very thorough and the notes help if you want to track back for yourself. The things that happen to the women and their families is just heartbreaking but I felt hopeful at the end. I highly recommend this book.
I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I was given this book by HarperCollins in exchange for a honest review.
From the back of the book- Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three women.
Sophie Turner-Zaretzky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but later became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In reading the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be “such good girls,” R. D. Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation- the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he re-creates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up “hiding places” and finally brought them together.
Review- This was a fascinating and wonderful read. I truly enjoyed this book. I felt that there was really some hope for both these survivors and others who have had to hide from horrible things in their lives. The three women that the story mostly focus’ on are truly terrifying and amazing. They survived things that no one should ever have to and then they go on to lead lives that help other people. The women talk about how hard it was to move on but they do. They are inspiring. The writing is wonderful, the research is heartbreaking but I felt like I could trust Rosen. He was very thorough and the notes help if you want to track back for yourself. The things that happen to the women and their families is just heartbreaking but I felt hopeful at the end. I highly recommend this book.
I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I was given this book by HarperCollins in exchange for a honest review.
December 16, 2017
3.5 stars. Yet another piece to the Holocaust I’ve read little about- the hidden children. The book started off being written in more of a novel format which I liked. I wish the part written about Flora had included more, as it came right after the section written about Sophie which was much more detailed. After the first section of the book, I found it more difficult to read as it switched from being novel-like, to more journalistic. The part written about the hidden children survivor’s struggle to identify with a religion seemed to go on too long. I’m glad I read this to get the perspective of several hidden children’s views on what happened to them during WWII, but I just wish the book flowed better.
August 8, 2019
The first story in this book was great. About a jewish girl who was hidden during WW2 to survive. It had a lot of details and great information. After that chapter the author interrupts the flow and puts in his experience of interviewing these (now) women - something I thought should have went in the afterward. Then it goes into a story of a different girl and then a third. These 2 stories were not at all detailed and were only a few pages in length. The entire feel of the book was gone for me. I gave up!
August 17, 2020
It is the story of 3 little girls from 3 different countries that survive the Holocaust. After the war, these girls all move to NYC and become friends thru an organization for hidden children. I had no idea what challenges these children faced getting thru the war and then for the rest of their lives. A wonderful story yet such a sad story.
January 18, 2023
Really good but very sad.
June 11, 2019
I am thankful that R.D. Rosen did the research and wrote this book. This is a part of the Holocaust of which I was unaware.
October 16, 2017
The most famous "hidden child" of the Shoah is, undoubtedly, Anne Frank. Unfortunately, Anne was captured and died of disease merely weeks before the liberation of Bergen Belsen where she and her sister, Margot, were imprisoned.
The lives of the children documented by R.D. Rosen were more fortunate in that they survived the Holocaust. However, they live with an unending legacy of survivor's guilt, tortured memories, and bringing their lost childhoods into their adult lives.
The author focuses on three women: Sophie, from Poland; Flora, from France; and Carla, from the Netherlands. Each child, saved by prescient mothers, was taught to espouse Catholicism, the predominant religion of Europe, except Flora, whose contrarian adoptive parents raised her as a Protestant. The new religion was so deeply ingrained that reclaiming their Judaism was extraordinarily difficult and was more of an ethnic identity than a religion. While Sophie, drilled in Catholicism until she became an anti-Semite, may have prayed to Gd often, the inevitable question of "where was Gd" is the counterpoint to this book.
Unlike Anne Frank, each of the women and other hidden children, were not secreted in one location but constantly moved from family to family. The husband of Carla, himself a hidden child, was in as many as eighteen "secret" locations before he became a member of the Underground to actively fight the enemy.
The author discusses the internal "fights" among survivors where Hidden Children are something of an afterthought since they did not actually survive the death camps. However, as the author explains, theirs is still a traumatized experience, learning to deny the very existence of their families and sliding in and out of identities that may have saved them but destroyed their inner strengths and ties to the past.
Each woman eventually found her way to the US, although their paths were sometimes circuitous. Here, they have raised families and transferred their memories and traumas to second and third generations of their families.
The fate of the Hidden Child is not the most often told story of the Holocaust because these children lived and, frankly, the world is far more fascinated with dead Jews than living ones. In fact, some of these survivors are told by others that they should stop repeating their stories because no one really cares anymore. For that reason, if for no other, I give this book five stars and urge readers to learn this other chapter of the Final Solution. As the past year has proven, with the rise of the Alt Right both here and abroad, we are not yet civilized enough to forget about the millions, Jewish and non-Jewish, who died at the hands of the Nazis. These survivors lived for a purpose: to tell their story and hand it down, generation to generation, so that the deniers, the "Jews will not replace us" marchers called "some good people" by the most powerful man in this country, are not granted the power of their lie.
Santayana said it best, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." This book is a reminder of the horrors that history has left behind in the stories of those that survived to tell the tale.
The lives of the children documented by R.D. Rosen were more fortunate in that they survived the Holocaust. However, they live with an unending legacy of survivor's guilt, tortured memories, and bringing their lost childhoods into their adult lives.
The author focuses on three women: Sophie, from Poland; Flora, from France; and Carla, from the Netherlands. Each child, saved by prescient mothers, was taught to espouse Catholicism, the predominant religion of Europe, except Flora, whose contrarian adoptive parents raised her as a Protestant. The new religion was so deeply ingrained that reclaiming their Judaism was extraordinarily difficult and was more of an ethnic identity than a religion. While Sophie, drilled in Catholicism until she became an anti-Semite, may have prayed to Gd often, the inevitable question of "where was Gd" is the counterpoint to this book.
Unlike Anne Frank, each of the women and other hidden children, were not secreted in one location but constantly moved from family to family. The husband of Carla, himself a hidden child, was in as many as eighteen "secret" locations before he became a member of the Underground to actively fight the enemy.
The author discusses the internal "fights" among survivors where Hidden Children are something of an afterthought since they did not actually survive the death camps. However, as the author explains, theirs is still a traumatized experience, learning to deny the very existence of their families and sliding in and out of identities that may have saved them but destroyed their inner strengths and ties to the past.
Each woman eventually found her way to the US, although their paths were sometimes circuitous. Here, they have raised families and transferred their memories and traumas to second and third generations of their families.
The fate of the Hidden Child is not the most often told story of the Holocaust because these children lived and, frankly, the world is far more fascinated with dead Jews than living ones. In fact, some of these survivors are told by others that they should stop repeating their stories because no one really cares anymore. For that reason, if for no other, I give this book five stars and urge readers to learn this other chapter of the Final Solution. As the past year has proven, with the rise of the Alt Right both here and abroad, we are not yet civilized enough to forget about the millions, Jewish and non-Jewish, who died at the hands of the Nazis. These survivors lived for a purpose: to tell their story and hand it down, generation to generation, so that the deniers, the "Jews will not replace us" marchers called "some good people" by the most powerful man in this country, are not granted the power of their lie.
Santayana said it best, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." This book is a reminder of the horrors that history has left behind in the stories of those that survived to tell the tale.
October 8, 2014
I received this book as a free copy from the publisher to read and review, and I have to say that I went through such a range of emotions as I relived the Holocaust through the eyes of the hidden children. The book mostly chronicles the stories of three girls (Sophie, Flora and Carla), their lives as children in hiding in Europe and their lives after the war and subsequent adulthood in New York City; although towards the end of the book, short histories of other hidden children are also chronicled as each experience was different for each survivor. It goes without saying that an adult survivor of the Holocaust survived a horrific event in history, but a child survivor had a equally horrible and yet different experience, one that many hidden children still living today have trouble even expressing and admitting to being hidden, as the silence that helped them live as children still has a strong hold on them as adults. The book describes many of the atrocities of the Holocaust, even those commmitted not by the Nazis but also by other Germans, Poles, Russians, etc. before, during and after the war. Even as we witness the loss of family, friends and identity, we still feel an unease as each survivor matures, becomes a professional and tries to live life fully when that very life still seems unsafe and distrustful. The book does end on a strong note that over the years, these stories and experiences have been given a voice as the many hidden children now have organizations and forums in which they can chronicle their experiences, find missing friends and relatives and overall find safte and companionship in the community that is just like them.
February 9, 2015
My consensus of the holocaust is its about the survivors of the concentration camps during WWII. This book opened my eyes to a whole generation of what's known as the hidden child survivors. Children separated from their families, watch them die in some instances, forced to denounce their heritage, religious beliefs in order to survive the Nazi persecution of the Jews. These children would be taken in by strangers, some good, some bad, forced to hide in abandoned buildings, always living with the fear of being discovered by the Nazi's which could result in immediate death of sent off to the many concentration camps. The part I enjoyed most about this book was finding out what has happened to many of these survivors. Many of endured a lifetime of feeling like they will always be hiding from something. One of my favorite excerpts was "However well they get along in the world now, they are always reminded of the Holocaust by the things they must do, the things they must avoid, and the thoughts that have lives of their own".
October 1, 2016
Fascinating story of the "hidden" children of WWII. We all know about Anne Frank, but I was not aware of the vast underground of children who were taken in by non-Jews and saved by having their Jewish identities erased. The author picks and chooses the stories to tell, which is understandable. I was bothered by the book's lack of good editing (for me, more and more a problem these days; where are the editors?). If that doesn't bother you particularly, and you're interested in WWII history, you would probably find this book to be a good read.
August 4, 2014
The accounts of the girls' stories were compelling and I wanted to know more. The latter part of the book was dry, more academic, and a bit scattered.
I received a digital review copy through Edelweiss in exchange for my comments.
I received a digital review copy through Edelweiss in exchange for my comments.
May 14, 2015
I wanted to like this book. The stories it shares are inspiring, but the overall writing style was just so dry & academic that it was hard to stay interested, or to feel any sort of connection to the women.
June 11, 2016
A fascinating subject poorly written about.
January 6, 2019
Very informative, esp the second half
September 14, 2018
I didn’t know how much I needed to read this book until I read it. I was hesitant to read it at first because I’ve been needing more uplifting books and a book about the Holocaust is generally the opposite of uplifting. But this book was the perfect balance of depressing historical events and victim empowerment. It made for bittersweet reading. On one hand, the hidden children defied Hitler’s attempt to eradicate the Jewish race. On the other hand, those same hidden children lived with psychological repercussions their entire lives.
This book followed the stories of three Holocaust survivors: Sophie, Flora, and Carla. Sophie and her mother assumed false identities as Polish Catholics. They survived out in the open right under the Nazis’ noses. Flora was saved when she didn’t raise her hand at school when the students were asked to raise their hands if they were Jews. She was moved from home to home until she landed in the home of an elderly couple who later adopted her. Carla found a place with a family who already had lots of mouths to feed. She was burdened by what was happening outside of the relative safety of their home and also by her self-imposed silence. But their initial survival was only the beginning.
I was horrified but unsurprised to learn that anti-Semitism continued to be prevalent in Poland even after the Nazis left. Over 2,000 Jews were murdered after the end of the war. 42 of those 2,000 were murdered by a Polish mob who accused Jews of kidnapping a Christian boy. It turned out that the “kidnapped” boy in question wasn’t kidnapped at all, he had just gone over to a friend’s house without telling his parents. Yikes doesn’t even begin to cover it.
This book went beyond what these peoples’ experiences were as hidden children. It also went into the experiences they had as adults, who were still in some ways hidden. Most of the victims still suppressed themselves, a technique many of them used to withstand the pressure of being in hiding. More still had repressed memories of their experience. They also struggled to find their identities because they didn’t have memories of being raised in a Jewish background. How was someone like Flora supposed to find her Jewish identity with all her close Jewish relatives dead and when she was raised under multiple religions in her various homes? How was someone like Sophie supposed to find her Jewish identity when she was raised as an anti-Semitic Catholic in Poland? But find their identities they did, just in some unusual, unorthodox ways. Also present were the psychological effects they had due to the trauma of being in hiding. Survivors had symptoms of PTSD, a lack of feeling safe, the feeling they didn’t belong anywhere, and more.
This quote is so timely. I don’t think it will ever cease to be relevant. This quote is for the people who turn away from history (particularly America’s slavery and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples) because they feel like they’re expected to feel guilty about it. This quote invites everyone to learn from history without the burden of guilt.
And, finally, Badass Moms Corner. I know these moms attribute a large part of their survival to luck, but I’d argue that some of it was still due to their persuasiveness, ingenuity, and perseverence. Here are some of the highlights of the daring feats of some of the mothers in this book that I admire:
Laura, Sophie’s mother, persuaded the Nazis from taking her and Sophie from their ghetto to the gas chambers 4 times. She also marched to SS headquarters to demand the return of her iron which was stolen by a Nazi. And, she was given a secretary job to a Nazi when she threatened to report his dishonesty to the Gestapo. She even tried to give insider information to the Polish rebels, but they mistrusted her too much to accept it.
As for Ed’s mother, Engeline, she escaped the Nazis’ clutches through quick thinking and good acting. She saved herself and her son by pretending to be lovers so the Nazis wouldn’t think too much about why they were in the forest near a rebel camp. She even escaped Bergen-Belsen by convincing a Nazi that she was American so that she could be exchanged for a German POW.
Yay for heroic badass moms!
This book followed the stories of three Holocaust survivors: Sophie, Flora, and Carla. Sophie and her mother assumed false identities as Polish Catholics. They survived out in the open right under the Nazis’ noses. Flora was saved when she didn’t raise her hand at school when the students were asked to raise their hands if they were Jews. She was moved from home to home until she landed in the home of an elderly couple who later adopted her. Carla found a place with a family who already had lots of mouths to feed. She was burdened by what was happening outside of the relative safety of their home and also by her self-imposed silence. But their initial survival was only the beginning.
“The surviving Jews had crossed a great desert against all odds, dragged themselves to what they thought was safety, only to find themselves locked out of their own lives or staring into a newly dug grave.”
I was horrified but unsurprised to learn that anti-Semitism continued to be prevalent in Poland even after the Nazis left. Over 2,000 Jews were murdered after the end of the war. 42 of those 2,000 were murdered by a Polish mob who accused Jews of kidnapping a Christian boy. It turned out that the “kidnapped” boy in question wasn’t kidnapped at all, he had just gone over to a friend’s house without telling his parents. Yikes doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“‘Life demands so much attention to daily issues, but the Holocaust candle is always there, although it burns at a low, wavering flame.’”
This book went beyond what these peoples’ experiences were as hidden children. It also went into the experiences they had as adults, who were still in some ways hidden. Most of the victims still suppressed themselves, a technique many of them used to withstand the pressure of being in hiding. More still had repressed memories of their experience. They also struggled to find their identities because they didn’t have memories of being raised in a Jewish background. How was someone like Flora supposed to find her Jewish identity with all her close Jewish relatives dead and when she was raised under multiple religions in her various homes? How was someone like Sophie supposed to find her Jewish identity when she was raised as an anti-Semitic Catholic in Poland? But find their identities they did, just in some unusual, unorthodox ways. Also present were the psychological effects they had due to the trauma of being in hiding. Survivors had symptoms of PTSD, a lack of feeling safe, the feeling they didn’t belong anywhere, and more.
“‘The responsibility,’ Flora says, ‘Is to remember history instead of feeling guilty about it.’”
This quote is so timely. I don’t think it will ever cease to be relevant. This quote is for the people who turn away from history (particularly America’s slavery and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples) because they feel like they’re expected to feel guilty about it. This quote invites everyone to learn from history without the burden of guilt.
And, finally, Badass Moms Corner. I know these moms attribute a large part of their survival to luck, but I’d argue that some of it was still due to their persuasiveness, ingenuity, and perseverence. Here are some of the highlights of the daring feats of some of the mothers in this book that I admire:
Laura, Sophie’s mother, persuaded the Nazis from taking her and Sophie from their ghetto to the gas chambers 4 times. She also marched to SS headquarters to demand the return of her iron which was stolen by a Nazi. And, she was given a secretary job to a Nazi when she threatened to report his dishonesty to the Gestapo. She even tried to give insider information to the Polish rebels, but they mistrusted her too much to accept it.
As for Ed’s mother, Engeline, she escaped the Nazis’ clutches through quick thinking and good acting. She saved herself and her son by pretending to be lovers so the Nazis wouldn’t think too much about why they were in the forest near a rebel camp. She even escaped Bergen-Belsen by convincing a Nazi that she was American so that she could be exchanged for a German POW.
Yay for heroic badass moms!
January 16, 2024
#bookreview “Memórias do Silêncio" by R. D. Rosen translated by Editora Vogais with 304 pages and the genre is literature, memories and testimony
Este livro acompanha a vida de três crianças escondidas durante o Holocausto, uma delas escondida com a mãe usando documentos falsos e se passando por católica, as outras duas em situações diferentes e às vezes piores.
Alguns não aprenderiam que eram judeus até cresceram e terem dificuldade em aceitar a verdade.
Sophie Tunner foi criada por uma família católica para proteger a sua identidade judaica.
Flora Hogman também foi protegida e criada por vários membros da fé cristã e Carla Lessing lutou para sobreviver à guerra e às atrocidades da Gestapo com a sua família escondida por estrangeiros holandeses quando a Holanda estava sob ocupação. Todas as três mulheres cresceram sob o terror, mais tarde migraram para os Estados Unidos e destacaram-se na educação e na sua área de estudo para ajudar as crianças sobreviventes escondidas.
Finalmente parecia que o sonho americano se tornara realidade, mas foi construído sobre a base de pesadelos, tragédias e feridas que não se cicatrizam.
Este livro tenta recriar o evento que aconteceu, e visto através dos olhos de mulheres jovens que não sabiam que existe um mal que se esconde neste mundo.
Sophie, nascida como Selma Schwarzland em Lvov, na Polônia, viveu no gueto polonês antes de fugir com a mãe e tem a experiência mais vivida e assustadora das três mulheres. Ela viveu cenários em que alemães atiraram e mataram quase 5.000 judeus doentes e idosos na rua Janowska, no gueto de Lvov. Mais de 15.000 judeus foram enviados a Belzec, não muito longe de de Lvov, para extermínio. Nas semanas seguintes, quase 150 mil mulheres, crianças e idosos perderam a vida. Sophie, sob proteção constante da mãe, vivia com a ameaça iminente de morte e desperava-se ao compreender a crueldade perpetrada em nome da limpeza étnica.
O escritor faz um bom trabalho ao apresentar estes casos e examina a culpa que muitos deles têm por sobreviver, quando tantos de seus familiares não sobreviveram.
Também aprendi algumas coisas novas, a Bélgica abrigou mais de 4.000 judeus e holandeses tiveram a maior percentagem de judeus perdidos.
A bravura de todos os envolvidos é considerável e estou admirada com a sua coragem e sacrifício. Se ao menos mais pessoas se sentissem assim.
Este livro é verdadeiramente fascinante. Recomendo fortemente este livro a qualquer pessoa interessada na história e na sobrevivência do povo judeu, especialmente as crianças.
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Já foram dar oportunidade a este livro incrível ✨ se sim digam-me tudo, gostaram ou não gostaram?
*
(Agora é o momento de avançar para a próxima leitura 😁)
__________________
@biblioteca.da.ana
Este livro acompanha a vida de três crianças escondidas durante o Holocausto, uma delas escondida com a mãe usando documentos falsos e se passando por católica, as outras duas em situações diferentes e às vezes piores.
Alguns não aprenderiam que eram judeus até cresceram e terem dificuldade em aceitar a verdade.
Sophie Tunner foi criada por uma família católica para proteger a sua identidade judaica.
Flora Hogman também foi protegida e criada por vários membros da fé cristã e Carla Lessing lutou para sobreviver à guerra e às atrocidades da Gestapo com a sua família escondida por estrangeiros holandeses quando a Holanda estava sob ocupação. Todas as três mulheres cresceram sob o terror, mais tarde migraram para os Estados Unidos e destacaram-se na educação e na sua área de estudo para ajudar as crianças sobreviventes escondidas.
Finalmente parecia que o sonho americano se tornara realidade, mas foi construído sobre a base de pesadelos, tragédias e feridas que não se cicatrizam.
Este livro tenta recriar o evento que aconteceu, e visto através dos olhos de mulheres jovens que não sabiam que existe um mal que se esconde neste mundo.
Sophie, nascida como Selma Schwarzland em Lvov, na Polônia, viveu no gueto polonês antes de fugir com a mãe e tem a experiência mais vivida e assustadora das três mulheres. Ela viveu cenários em que alemães atiraram e mataram quase 5.000 judeus doentes e idosos na rua Janowska, no gueto de Lvov. Mais de 15.000 judeus foram enviados a Belzec, não muito longe de de Lvov, para extermínio. Nas semanas seguintes, quase 150 mil mulheres, crianças e idosos perderam a vida. Sophie, sob proteção constante da mãe, vivia com a ameaça iminente de morte e desperava-se ao compreender a crueldade perpetrada em nome da limpeza étnica.
O escritor faz um bom trabalho ao apresentar estes casos e examina a culpa que muitos deles têm por sobreviver, quando tantos de seus familiares não sobreviveram.
Também aprendi algumas coisas novas, a Bélgica abrigou mais de 4.000 judeus e holandeses tiveram a maior percentagem de judeus perdidos.
A bravura de todos os envolvidos é considerável e estou admirada com a sua coragem e sacrifício. Se ao menos mais pessoas se sentissem assim.
Este livro é verdadeiramente fascinante. Recomendo fortemente este livro a qualquer pessoa interessada na história e na sobrevivência do povo judeu, especialmente as crianças.
*
*
Já foram dar oportunidade a este livro incrível ✨ se sim digam-me tudo, gostaram ou não gostaram?
*
(Agora é o momento de avançar para a próxima leitura 😁)
__________________
@biblioteca.da.ana
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 6, 2021
While a good accounting of three Jewish girls who were hidden during WWII it did not have the punch I was looking for. The author interviewed the women now living in the US and the narrative was compiled from their memories which at times was sketchy.
The story of the generation of hidden child survivors told through the true experiences of three Jewish girls--from Poland, Holland, and France--who transcended their traumatic childhoods to lead remarkable lives in America.
Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.
Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In braiding the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be "such good girls," Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation--the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he recreates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up "hiding places" and finally brought them together.
The story of the generation of hidden child survivors told through the true experiences of three Jewish girls--from Poland, Holland, and France--who transcended their traumatic childhoods to lead remarkable lives in America.
Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.
Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an anti-Semitic Catholic schoolgirl, eventually became an esteemed radiation oncologist. Flora Hogman, protected by a succession of Christians, emerged from the war a lonely, lost orphan, but became a psychologist who pioneered the study of hidden child survivors. Unlike Anne Frank, Carla Lessing made it through the war concealed with her family in the home of Dutch strangers before becoming a psychotherapist and key player in the creation of an international organization of hidden child survivors.
In braiding the stories of three women who defied death by learning to be "such good girls," Rosen examines a silent and silenced generation--the last living cohort of Holocaust survivors. He provides rich, memorable portraits of a handful of hunted children who, as adults, were determined to deny Hitler any more victories, and he recreates the extraordinary event that lured so many hidden child survivors out of their grown-up "hiding places" and finally brought them together.
September 20, 2022
I stumbled upon this non-fiction book, published in 2014, in the religions section of a used bookstore. I was captivated from the start by the accounts of the lives of Jewish children who were hidden for their safety during WWII and survived to grow into old age. But their stories of surviving did not end with the war: they had damaged psyches; the inability to reconcile an assumed Christian identity foisted on them with the reality that they were Jewish; struggles with the knowledge that they survived but other family members, friends, and neighbors did not; and reluctance to share their stories. Through their stories you will earn how a network to help these now adult survivors was started in NY in the 1990s and grew to a world-wide network. I also learned more about non-religious Jews, both those born in America and those who survived the Holocaust, and the varied reasons they identify as Jewish.
Three women and one mother form the foundation of the narrative but their stories lead to those of others and the ways they all survived and, in turn, helped other survivors.
Most of us know about Anne Frank’s story, but it had a tragic end. To learn the stories of survivors, I highly recommend Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R.D. Rosen. And to those who read a lot of fiction set in WWII and involving the Holocaust, I also recommend this highly readable book.
Three women and one mother form the foundation of the narrative but their stories lead to those of others and the ways they all survived and, in turn, helped other survivors.
Most of us know about Anne Frank’s story, but it had a tragic end. To learn the stories of survivors, I highly recommend Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust by R.D. Rosen. And to those who read a lot of fiction set in WWII and involving the Holocaust, I also recommend this highly readable book.
August 28, 2017
The first half of book covers the stories of three Jewish girls hidden in three different countries during WWII. The first one, Sophie's story, was the hardest to read, because there are graphic descriptions of Nazis killing children. Most everyone interested in Holocaust stories, however, should be able to make it through all three stories.
The second half of the book deals with many more hidden children, and discusses their feelings and fears as survivors. It also looks at what happened when they started getting together as adults, meeting others who shared their horrifying experiences. Sexual abuse of children by those who hid them is touched on, something not usually mentioned in other general writings about these children. A much less horrific topic covered in the second section is religion, and how the surviving children see themselves as religious individuals. Many of the children were hidden by Catholics and were being raised Catholic during the war. One became a priest.
For the most part, I thought the book was an excellent read. I didn't have trouble with the second part that others reviewers apparently had. That was actually my favorite part. Like others, though, I felt the title did not fit the book very well. It is understanding why the author chose that title, however, since the hidden children had to be good and silent in hiding to survive. But they weren't all girls. I think a better title would have been Such Good & Silent Children.
(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)
The second half of the book deals with many more hidden children, and discusses their feelings and fears as survivors. It also looks at what happened when they started getting together as adults, meeting others who shared their horrifying experiences. Sexual abuse of children by those who hid them is touched on, something not usually mentioned in other general writings about these children. A much less horrific topic covered in the second section is religion, and how the surviving children see themselves as religious individuals. Many of the children were hidden by Catholics and were being raised Catholic during the war. One became a priest.
For the most part, I thought the book was an excellent read. I didn't have trouble with the second part that others reviewers apparently had. That was actually my favorite part. Like others, though, I felt the title did not fit the book very well. It is understanding why the author chose that title, however, since the hidden children had to be good and silent in hiding to survive. But they weren't all girls. I think a better title would have been Such Good & Silent Children.
(Note: I received a free ARC of this book from Amazon Vine.)
March 29, 2018
Such Good Girls chronicles the true stories of children who were hidden by other families or in convents during the Holocaust, and who survived to recount these. The focus is on a handful of these child survivors, elderly at the time the book was written, who were willing to share their stories. When we think of Holocaust survivors, we typically think of those who by some miracle made it out of a concentration camp, but they are not alone in having suffered as a result of the actions of one of the most evil men ever to walk the face of the earth. Many children were given away by their parents to strangers who were willing to take them in and hide them, most of them then raised as Catholics. Some of these housings were not actually as charitable as others, and a percentage of these children suffered physical or sexual abuse by their "rescuers". Even in the best of situations, where the rescuer showed the child love and treated them well, as adults these children bear the scars of what seemed to them to be an abandonment by their biological parents, some of whom were never seen again. Poignantly written with sad, but also with some rewarding anecdotes, survival being chief amongst them.
December 28, 2018
R.D. Rosen met Sophie accidentally at a friend's Seder, and when he learned she had survived the Holocaust by posing as a Catholic child, he didn't really know what to say. He had never met any Holocaust survivors. However, he got an idea for a short story for children based on the little stuffed bear she carried with her and this grew into a friendship and ultimately this book which tells the stories of three young girls who survived genocide by hiding.
These narratives are descriptive and compelling. The stories of how these women survived the trauma of these experiences as they grew older is perhaps more compelling. Those stories lack the same story arc of the first, but that's life, and I appreciated how Rosen's journalistic background shapes this part of the book.
Rosen weaves in the story of how media shaped the narratives of World War 2 and "the Final Solution," ultimately minimizing the suffering of Jews during this time frame. I knew about anti-Semitism in Europe before the war, but I never learned how Jews continued to be killed even after Hitler had been stopped. I learned a lot reading this book, which is meticulously researched. I couldn't put it down.
These narratives are descriptive and compelling. The stories of how these women survived the trauma of these experiences as they grew older is perhaps more compelling. Those stories lack the same story arc of the first, but that's life, and I appreciated how Rosen's journalistic background shapes this part of the book.
Rosen weaves in the story of how media shaped the narratives of World War 2 and "the Final Solution," ultimately minimizing the suffering of Jews during this time frame. I knew about anti-Semitism in Europe before the war, but I never learned how Jews continued to be killed even after Hitler had been stopped. I learned a lot reading this book, which is meticulously researched. I couldn't put it down.
October 9, 2021
A profoundly moving narrative of the children who survived the Holocaust, hiding in closets, convents, in remote farms and wherever non-Jewish families were willing to take them in and shelter them from the Nazis. The book follows three young girls in Poland, France and the Netherlands, who were unrelated to one another, but shared the trauma of living through WWII trying to survive Hitler's Final Solution. Their circumstances were desperate and relentlessly traumatizing.
It follows them through their memories of their harrowing childhood ordeals, to their lives in present day, and was riveting. Very often, these memories were suppressed and they had never dealt with them; often they could not identify with being Jewish, because they had been told that they must erases their identities to remain alive. I have read many books, both fiction and non-fiction, of the Nazi occupation and atrocities, but I was still so emotional throughout this book. The inhumanity of the Nazis can never be forgotten. “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Books like this are an important reminder to remain vigilant.
It follows them through their memories of their harrowing childhood ordeals, to their lives in present day, and was riveting. Very often, these memories were suppressed and they had never dealt with them; often they could not identify with being Jewish, because they had been told that they must erases their identities to remain alive. I have read many books, both fiction and non-fiction, of the Nazi occupation and atrocities, but I was still so emotional throughout this book. The inhumanity of the Nazis can never be forgotten. “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” Books like this are an important reminder to remain vigilant.
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