Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, Stunning, Touching, Gripping
Review: This amazing story will be sure to make anybody want to cry. It is powerful, truthful, and uttery complete. The holocust was a dark time, a time of sadness, rather you are Jewish or not. It must be remimbered. Even though I am not Jewish, even though I have never gone through these bitter years, I can just flip through these pages and feel her pain and tears. I will never feel the cold coming through my clothes, I will never starve of hunger, my feet will never be cut and bruised, and I will never be beaten with someones cold rife, but I will know ones remarkable story, wich will make me relize, I am fortunate.
Rating:
Summary: What an AWESOME book-movie material big time!
Review: This is the best Holocaust book I have read so far. It was touching, sad, and really heartwarming. Like most books written by survivors of concentration camps, it makes you angry that people could be so cruel and ruthlessly kill people and children at the drop of a hat. Rena and Danka are sisters, aged 21 and 19 when they are sent to Auschwitz. Rena promises her mother that she will take care of her baby sister Danka, and watch after her, and never leave her side. Rena sticks by that promise and lives it out. The book shows that there is strength in numbers, and how sticking by each other, can help people through the most horrible situations. Even at the camps, where murder, starvation and disease was rampant, Rena and Danka managed to make alot of friends, including some male inmates on the other side of the electric fence. These men managed to sneak medical supplies,food and notes to Rena and Danka, giving them the strength to try and survive one more day. There are helpful footnotes at the bottom of many of the pages explaining some historical facts and definitions the reader may not have been previously familiar with. I was particularly disturbed at the part where the SS selected some girls to practice gymnastics for a few days so that they may put on a show for the very SS guards that sometimes yelled and beat them. All for a little bit of extra food. The girls were already sick and weak and to make these girls do this was outright cruel-no surprise though to people who know how evil the SS and Nazi's were. Rena's quick thinking got her and Danka out of a couple situations which would have resulted in imminent death. There is also a nice update at the end of the book and Rena does her best to update the reader on some main characters in the book-the friends that helped her, and the enemies that made her life hell. Excellent book. 10/10. Speiberg, take note.
Rating:
Summary: Raw and moving
Review: This was a very involving and detailed book; even though the content can be too much for some people, I really like how many specific details were given about what happened every day, instead of, like some other Shoah memoirs, just skipping between the most important events during the author's incarceration, or not giving enough details about daily life. I've read some pretty detailed Shoah memoirs, but this one by far has been the most intricately detailed one, complete with footnotes elaborating even further on the event or date being described. Rena and Danka were also prisoners in the camp from practically the very beginning, among the first civilian transports, as opposed to how there were originally only male political prisoners there. These incredible sisters had some incredible strokes of luck the way they escaped nearly certain death so many times, like when they just walked away from the roll call taking place before Mengele was to begin medical experiments or when Rena evaded detection at several roll calls after she stole potatoes in the last camp they were in. I would have liked some extra chapters on how they got by after the liberation too, but the afterword sufficed, telling us the basics about what happened to them and their friend Dina, as well as the fates of the various other people we met throughout the book, like the male prisoners who helped to save them at various points, or the fate of their other relatives and friends. I also liked how the story was told in nonlinear perspective at the beginning (i.e., in different voices and at different times). It was also surprising to read at the beginning that Rena had had her tattoo surgically removed and kept it in a jar of formaldehyde; I've only heard of a handful of survivors who elected to have their tattoos removed.
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