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Tricking The Devil: War-Time Diary of a Teenager During the Holocaust
Book by Gundersheimer, Dorla
149 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
12 people want to read
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November 20, 2009
The author has a very unusual story to tell. (It is a memoir, not a diary. It doesn't even contain any diary entries. I wish people would stop calling books "diaries" when they are not.) Hers is the only Jewish family I know of that survived the Holocaust living quite openly in Germany, not even changing their names or anything. Which is not to say it was easy. They owe their survival partly to some helpful gentile friends, partly to chutzpah, partly to the author's resourceful older brother and mostly to sheer dumb luck.
I do wish Gundersheimer had gone into more detail. Her book is short, covering only about 150 pages, and it felt like she rushed through it. She doesn't talk very much about her feelings at all, not even when the man who was helping to protect her family made her pay for it by raping her repeatedly. And the story ends abruptly with her meeting an American soldier, accidentally poisoning him, then marrying him, all in a couple of pages. I would have also liked an epilogue about the fate of the author, her mother and her brother. I suppose overall, this is as good a Holocaust memoir as any, not really standing out from the genre that much.
I do wish Gundersheimer had gone into more detail. Her book is short, covering only about 150 pages, and it felt like she rushed through it. She doesn't talk very much about her feelings at all, not even when the man who was helping to protect her family made her pay for it by raping her repeatedly. And the story ends abruptly with her meeting an American soldier, accidentally poisoning him, then marrying him, all in a couple of pages. I would have also liked an epilogue about the fate of the author, her mother and her brother. I suppose overall, this is as good a Holocaust memoir as any, not really standing out from the genre that much.
Displaying 1 of 1 review