Book Description:
A monument to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.
In these compelling, award-winning, Holocaust memoirs, Nanette Blitz Konig relates her amazing story of survival during the Second World War when she, together with her family and millions of other Jews, was imprisoned by the Nazis with a minimum chance of survival. Nanette (b. 1929) was a class mate of Anne Frank in the Jewish Lyceum of Amsterdam. They met again in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly before Anne died.
During these emotional encounters, Anne Frank told her how the Frank family hid in the annex, talked about their deportation, her experience in Auschwitz and about her plans for her diary after the war.
˃˃˃ This honest WW2 story describes the hourly battle for survival under the brutal conditions in the camp imposed by the Nazi regime.
It continues with her struggle to recover from the effects of starvation and tuberculosis after the war, and how she was gradually able to restart her life, marry and build a family.
Nanette Blitz Konig, mother of three, grandmother of six and great grand mother of four, lives in São Paulo, Brazil. Her Holocaust memoirs were written to speak in the name of those millions who were silenced forever.
My Thoughts:
It’s hard to put into words as well as rate a book that deals with the Holocaust. When you award a book five stars it’s because you’ve loved it! Really enjoyed it, blown you away even. When you read a book like this though, you can’t use words like that. Not because it isn’t worthy of five stars, if anything its worthy of so many more but they all feel so wrong to say about someone’s life story who has endured and witnessed such horrors in their lifetime. I felt privileged and honoured to read Nanette’s story and people need to keep reading these types of books so that we can learn from it.
This isn’t an overly long book but it’s one that will no doubt have an impact on its reader. Nanette starts off by sharing what life was like before and in the run up to the war starting. Life well before the war officially started for Jewish people was made to be unbearable even then. Businesses started to suffer, schools were divided, it’s hard to believe how callous the human race can be at times. Then we are shown what life is like in one of the many camps that were set up to destroy and demoralise not just Jewish people but anyone that was different to the Aryan race that Hitler envisioned.
Nanette also shows us what life was like after surviving the camp in the immediate as well as long after and how it affected her. My heart broke as people tried to find out what had happened to their loved ones. To survive and not even have a home to return to. Not every survivor wanted to talk about their experiences during the war, Nanette though began to speak about her experiences, first in schools and then further afield. There are some mentions of Anne Frank who of course due to her diary is a very prominent figure from that period of time. At the end there are also some photographs of Nanette and her family as well as other images from the camp.
Holocaust Memoirs of a Bergen-Belsen Survivor & Classmate of Anne Frank whilst a harrowing and at times upsetting read, it’s one that must be read and learned from. Nanette tells her story in a way that is both compelling and emotional for the reader. Whilst there are many books out there to do with the Holocaust, I think this one stands out in its own merit.
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