Interrupted Lives: Nine Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust by Amanda Friedeman and Kelley Szany; Minneapolis, Minnesota: Kar-ben Publishing; © 2025; ISBN 9798765-607763; 67 pages plus glossary; $10.99. Publication date: March 4, 2025
SAN DIEGO – This is a cross-section of Holocaust stories selected for young readers in cooperation with the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. The recollections of juvenile Holocaust survivors who resettled in the United States after World War II are compelling reading. Youngsters can easily empathize with the nine narrators.
In break-out boxes, places and terminology associated with the Holocaust are explained. In the first two chapters, for example, there are explanations regarding Drancy, Auschwitz, ghettos, Judenrat, Sobibor, Częstochowa, Buchenwald, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now known as HIAS.
At the end of each narration, survivors offer advice to the students or summaries of the lessons learned during their Holocaust experiences.
Adele Zaveduk, a French Jew, as a 4-year-old, was saved by a Catholic family, who raised her as their own. However, when the war ended and both her parents miraculously returned to Paris, the Catholic family declined to relinquish her. She was terribly confused, having been bought up to believe she was a Catholic.
Barney Sidler, a Polish Jew, was sent to a work camp with his parents, then to Buchenwald. When remnants of his extended family returned to Poland, they found that antisemitism still was rampant. With the help of HIAS, Sidler moved to a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany, then to New York and ultimately to Chicago.
Eric Blaustein saved himself for a while by posing as a Hitler Youth. Eventually, he was caught and sent to Buchenwald. There he assumed the identity of an Italian POW who just had died. Noticing that Eric could speak German, the Nazis assigned him as an interpreter. The only problem was that he didn’t speak Italian. Luckily, an Italian officer who also spoke German covered for him. Nine years after the war, Blaustein, his wife, and child immigrated to the United States.
Ernie Heimann was ten years old when his parents put him on the Kindertransport to England. He lived for four years in Northampton with the Swallow family, whose own children were serving in the British military. The Swallows were Christians who never tried to impose their beliefs on Heimann. In 1943, his brother, who earlier had immigrated to the United States, was successful arranging a visa, and Heimann crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the company of British sailors who were to become the crew of a US.-supplied ship. They made him their mascot. The ship made port in Halifax, where he disembarked and traveled overland to Chicago via Montreal and New York.
Frank Stern’s family fled to neutral Switzerland in 1939, then on to England, where he attended school for a year. In 1940, when he was 10, the family voyaged to the U.S., staying first in New York and then settling in Louisville where his aunt lived.
Judy Straus and her German family migrated to Holland in 1940, remaining there until 1943 when her family was deported through the Westerbork transit camp to the show ghetto of Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia. Her father was sent away; her mother had a work assignment every day. Judy was sent to an orphanage, where the swing was her favorite piece of playground equipment. Other children would watch but the swings were reserved for orphans. Judy was swinging when the other children were rounded up and sent away. “I felt guilty that I was okay, and the other kids might not have been. It still affects how I look at children on swings today.” Liberated when she was 12, she traveled with an uncle to America in 1949.
Magda Brown, a Hungarian, was confined at age 17 to the Jewish ghetto in Miskolc. Later, she was transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There she was separated from her parents, never to see them again. After some time, she was sent to Marburg, Germany, to work 12-hour shifts in an ammunition factory. As the war was ending, she was forced on a death march, escaping to a barn where she and a friend were discovered by American soldiers who liberated her.
Rodi Glass was a six-year-old growing up in Holland when the Nazi conquerors started deporting Jews to concentration camps. Sent with her family to the Westerbork transit camp, a guard who had grown up near them arranged for their release back to Amsterdam. Picked up again, the family was sent to the Vittel internment camp in France, owing to the fact that her mother had been born in England. When the war ended, the family returned to Amsterdam but the neighbors to whom they had given their family’s belongings refused to give them back. In 1951, the family immigrated to Chicago.
The last survivor who shared her biography in the book was Ruth Stern, whose family left their native Germany for Belgium, then moved to German-occupied France, then to Vichy France, and then to the Sidi-al-Ayachi internment camp in Morocco. A grandfather who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1928 arranged for their passage in 1941 to the United States. The peripatetic family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, before settling in New York.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.