For their privacy? Or perhaps to maintain the childlike perspective? She includes many photographs from before and after the war. She never names her family members, except by diminutives like Mamusia (for Mama), and her brother is never named at all. Lobel's story is heartbreaking, yet not emotionally fraught or graphic, in part because she was so young that her memories are at times innocent, and in part because she became emotionally numb to everything except wanting to stay with her brother. Five years later they emigrate to the US and the story ends. There they spend two years in a sanitarium with tuberculosis, until they are finally reunited with family. After stints in several different camps, they are liberated and taken to Sweden. Because their nanny was Catholic, they were taken away without an adult. They disguise her younger brother as a girl, because he could be identified as Jewish the moment he used a public bathroom.Īfter five years of hiding, the children are caught and taken first to a prison and then to Płaszów concentration camp. Fearing for the safety of the children, it was agreed that the nanny would take the children first to the village where family lived, and then to the nanny's tiny village. Her mother was able to secure fake documents and spent the war living and working as a Catholic Pole.

Her father disappeared one night, and it wasn't until after the war that she learned he had been sent to the Soviet camps. She and her parents and younger brother lived in a small apartment, along with her nanny.

Hanusia, as she was called by her family, was five years old when the Germans occupied her hometown of Krakow. Instead it is a wonderful glimpse into what it must have been like for a very young child to witness and experience the horrors of war and the Shoah. No reflections from her adult self on what she went through or about the war. This memoir is written for a younger audience, or perhaps it just feels that way because she writes from the perspective of her childhood self.

What I didn't know was that she was a very young Holocaust survivor. Anita Lobel is known for illustrating children's books, often in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Lobel of fame.

No Pretty Pictures by Anita Lobel