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Rating: 
Summary: An Uplifting Tale of Holocaust Survival and Mentality
Review: What I liked so much about the book is that it combines the best of journalism -- that of a vivid eyewitness account of unusual and often highly dramatic events -- with the best of literary writing, as a complex, engrossing, and beautifully written work. On New Year's Eve 1939, the teenage narrator is sent to her father in Vienna by the grandparents who have raised her, so that they can emigrate together. They do not succeed until she leaves, alone, in 1947, and the book describes her life during those eight years. Though it is a Holocaust account, I found the book not only gripping but almost uplifting. The narrator is Jewish but does not wear the star, and so she is both victim and bystander in the nightmarish world of Hitler's wartime Vienna. She describes persecutions, deprivations, and bomb attacks from this dual perspective, and finally also the battle for Vienna and the Russian occupation. Initially, she is a typical 15-year-old, sensitive and naïve, unselfish and self-absorbed, timid and reckless. What saves her seems to be her instinctive craving to "have a life", as she painfully and pluckily clings to the trivia of a "normal" existence even during those abnormal times. Thus she emerges at 23 -- or, at any rate, some fifty years later when she narrates the book -- as a sane, well-adjusted and life-affirming human being. The book is, at least in my view, superior to many other Holocaust memoirs because of the skill with which the author -- a professor of literature -- explores past and present, interweaving the eyewitness account of the participant teenage girl (authenticated by many direct diary quotes) and the observations of her adult self, which, half a century later, not only situates her childhood in the relevant historical context, but also analyzes her youthful self dispassionately, even critically, and thereby draws a complex and thought-provoking portrait of at least one survivor's mentality.
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