The Lost Childhood

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Dispossessed early in WW II by the Russians, Nir's affluent Polish family endured the German occupation and persecution as Jews by pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Ukrainians. After the father's murder, the 11-year-old author, his mother and 16-year-old sister escaped deportation to extermination camps by developing skills of rapid improvisation, and using forged identities and disguises. A tale of hair-raising adventure and countless hardships, this is also a candid, moving and sometimes funny account of a sensitive boy's crisis-dominated adolescence, which, while fraught with normal longings, included his serving as a courier in the fetid sewer system during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising. Russian liberators who freed the family from slave labor on a German estate, then accused them of collaboration with the Nazis, forcing the three to flee once again--this time back to Poland. (Oct.)

Library Journal

A Jewish adolescent trapped in Nazi Poland, Nir managed to avoid capture for four long years--years marked by forged papers, disguises, and numerous close calls. Though his writing style is somewhat wooden, the various anecdotes and adventures are invariably interesting; it would be difficult, for example, to remain unaffected by Nir's nightmarish experiences in the sewers of Warsaw during the 1944 uprising. Unfortunately, our hero sometimes seems implausibly precocious. Yet, overall, this is a rousing tale of survival and compares very favorably with Alicia Appleman-Jurman's Alicia: My Story ( LJ 11/15/88). Both clearly delineate the unmitigated horror connected with being a Jew in occupied Poland. Recommended.-- Mark R. Yerburgh, Trinity Coll. Lib., Burlington, Vt.