Four Perfect Pebbles:: A Holocaust Story

"A harrowing and often moving account."

School Library Journal

"The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what's said and in what's left out."

Booklist (Starred Review)

"Amid a growing number of memoirs about the Holocaust, this book warrants attention both for the uncommon experiences it records and for the fullness of that record."

Lila Perl is the author of such successful title as Mummies,Tombs, and Treasure and The Great Ancestor Hunt(both Notable Trade Books in the Field of Social Studies), and It Happened in America. Four Perfect Pebbles is her fifth book. Marion Blumenthal Lazan came to the United States from Germany in 1948 and has spent the last fifteen years speaking about her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. She tirelessly promotes this book, visiting schools and libraries frequently.

Elie Wiesel

Personal memoirs have no equal in their weight of truth and memory—[Marion Blumenthal Lazan's] have educated so many.

In Her Own Words...

"I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had a very ordinary and uneventful (as it seemed to me) childhood. I read voraciously, but it never occurred to me that I would one day become a writer. For one thing, I had never met a "real, live author," as young people do nowadays in their schools and libraries. And, in any case, most of the writers I read in my growing-up years, like Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, were dead.

"I didn't begin to publish juvenile fiction and nonfiction until my own children were in the fourth or fifth grades at school. I was stimulated by their expanding interests and by the realization that I had a great need to explore the longsilent world of my own childhood.

"Soon I was writing contemporary novels for middle-graders, among them the "Fat Glenda" series. I also became intrigued with the reaches and challenges of nonfiction. I ventured into the American culinary past with titles like Slumps, Grunts, and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why (Clarion). And I traveled to distant Egypt to do on-site research for Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure (Clarion).

"When I met Marion Blumenthal Lazan and heard her speak about her experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I knew that here was a story that had to be put into book form.

"As part of the Blumenthal family's six-and-a-half years under the Nazi yoke, Marion, her parents, and her brother spent fourteen months in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. This was the very camp in which Anne Frank had died ... and at the same time that Marion and her family were there. Anne Frank left us nowritings of her life in the camps. But Marion was able to convey to us the details of daily life, and of death, in that place of most indescribable horror.

"When Marion told me about the "four perfect pebbles" that she sought to gather each day on the barren grounds of the camp, I felt that that would be the perfect title for the book. For the lonely and frightened nine-year-old, the sets of matching pebbles offered some kind of assurance that Mama, Papa, her brother, Albert, and she would survive Bergen-Belsen, if not the war-long effects of the Holocaust itself.

"It's a source of great pride to me that Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story, which agreed to co-author at great emotional expense, is my fiftieth published book."