Strange & Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memories

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Summary: "Sudden & Unexpected Love" radiant among Holocaust memoirs
Review: Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller recounts her girlhood years during World War II, spent in increasing poverty and restriction and in the midst of horrid cruelties. Born in the Jewish shetl of Skala in Poland, in what is now Ukrania, Mrs. Heller was 15 when, in the middle of the night, the Germans arrived to round up the town's Jews. The Jews were taken out of the town, forced to dig their own graves, and shot. Mrs. Heller's beloved father had constructed a hiding place for their large family and so they survived that first purge. But that began four years of increasing privation: near-starvation, the desperate search for someplace to hide or someone to hide them, loss of family members, grotesque cruelties by the villagers. Mrs. Heller's admirer, Jan, a Gentile carpenter, first hid her at his house, then arranged with a former employee of Mr. Gottesfeld for the immediate family of four to be hidden at a farm. Their food and their accomodations became increasingly restricted, until they spent several months in a space behind the chicken coop, so small that if one moved, all had to move. Mrs. Heller also recounts the story of her developing love for Jan, and the strange turns that war brought to that love. Mrs. Heller writes beautifully. The engrossing story moves quickly, but retains the details and descriptions that make real her descriptions of the shtetl, her beloved parents and grandparents, and the life that they lived before the war. She is unstinting in her portrayals of wartime, telling us the worst as well as the best; but all of it in a matter-of-fact way. To read this book and spend a little time with a remarkable woman was a privilege.

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Summary: Holocaust Memoir Offers Interesting Subtext
Review: Heller's memoir is a fascinating, fast read. Chapters are short, usually no more than three pages, yet full of detail and meaning. The characters who emerge from the story are believable and all too human, despite the obvious, albeit understandable, bias of the author. Jews are depicted as good, or at least ordinary people. Poles are shown as anti-Semites and untrustworthy at best. Germans are evil. Ukrainians are regarded as "peasants" who combine the worst qualities of the Poles and Germans. Then there are Sidor and Jan: a Pole and a Ukrainian who risk their lives to save the Gottesfelds, one (Sidor) out of a mixture of decency and, perhaps, hope for reward, the other (Jan) out of love for the author. The book offers the grim details of Jewish persecution one would expect: the brutality, dehumanization, and summary executions at the hands of the Germans and their allies. But in its depiction of the Gottesfeld clan, especially the author's mother, it also opens a window into something else: the barely veiled contempt with which many of the relatively well to do Jews of the community regarded their less affluent and less educated "goyim" neighbors even before the outbreak of hostilities. The disappearance of Jan at story's end suggests that the author herself could not help but be influenced by these prevailing attitudes. All told, Heller's book is insightful and definitely worthwhile.