Diamonds in Auschwitz by Meg Hamand; Austin, Texas: River Grove Books; © 2025; ISBN 9781632-9999160; 334 pages; $19.95.
SAN DIEGO – Rachael, returning to her barracks from work sorting possessions of murdered new arrivals at Auschwitz, found in the mud a diamond and sapphire engagement ring. Knowing that the ring would be useless to her, even dangerous if it should be discovered, she nevertheless slipped it into her pocket as a small act of defiance.
This novel tells the overlapping stories of Rachael, whose children were murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz; Chaya, an unrelated child who somehow avoided being sent to the gas chambers whom Rachael adopts as a substitute; and Hanna and Samual, lovers in Prague, who are shipped to the ghetto/ concentration camp at Terezin, and finally who are separated at Auschwitz.
Hanna’s and Samual’s stories are set at the beginning of Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia, whereas the stories of Rachael and Chaya are set near the end of World War II. The unifying device between the two alternating fictional tales is the engagement ring, which Samual presented to Hanna while they lived in Nazi-ruled Prague.
An urban planner, Samual was offered a job by Prague’s Judenrat (Jewish Council) to design an expansion of Terezin from a medieval fortress to a prison town. Hanna, for being Jewish, was fired from her day job as a waitress at a Prague coffee shop. When the couple was transported to Terezin, Samual continued to exercise some influence as an employe of the Judenrat, providing protection for Hanna. For her part, Hanna, an artist, taught drawing to children at Terezin until she and Samual were sent “to the east.”
Chaya was young enough that she never had known anything but hiding from the Nazis in a cellar and, upon discovery, being imprisoned by them. Accordingly, she believed such conditions were normal. She thrilled to the fantastic stories that Rachael told her about how grass and colorful flowers grew outside Auschwitz. The woman and girl were inseparable until they weren’t.
Author Hamand convincingly portrays poignant and hopeful conversations between oppressed lovers, and the tender relationship between a bereaved mother and an orphaned child surviving in a facility constructed for their destruction.
Some of these people die in this novel, while others, despite all, survive. I predict readers, in the process of learning about the Holocaust, will turn the pages to learn the ultimate fate of each well-drawn character.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.