Customer Reviews

The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months In Auschwitz and Plaszow

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I suppose this would be considered a good historical account and I suppose it is. But the book doesn't make much sense. It was hard to follow. Obviously, as a diary written in a concentration camp by a teenager, it wasn't meant to be a book.

I had to do a biography and I picked this one, but it was really actually hard to understand and explain to the class the requirements of my book report. I could say it was very well done for a fourteen year old, but still, there were too many ideas taking place and that started to get confusing. I recommend this for any that wants to know more of the events of Aushwitz and Plasow, but for something for school, I highly recommend you to not read it. It is very hard to prepare a speech for the class on this one meeting all the requirements.

I found this book quite amazing. The horrors that she went through were described with amazing detail, and to me, I felt as if I were in her place. The vocabulary she uses to depict each seen seemed so carefully chosen, and extremely high level for her age. I also found it incredible that she was able to right this amazing book, just off of notes that she wrote when she was young. How terrible a position she must have been in.
There is one quote that I found fascinating. "Fever! Isn't it a sign of life, proof that I'm persevering, hanging on? Thank God, because after all is said and done, wouldn't it be stupid, wouldn't it be madness, to let go of a life where there are such nights, and such creatures?" These words hit me like a brick wall. Thinking back to all the times myself, and everyone around me as well, has complained about life, I felt so ungrateful. How can anyone do this, when there are people that have had such terrible catastrophes in their life, so bad that they are grateful to get sick and have a fever, just to feel alive?

I came upon this book in my local library and promptly checked it out. Yes, it does seem confusing but then again, when we look at the context within which this was written, the confusing aspect of the work seems natural. The author went through living hell during her period in the work and death camps, and it was a miracle that her attempts to keep a diary, however fragmented the entries may seem, was successful. This work is such a valuable documentation of a teenager's experience of the Holocaust...reading her entries, one gets an intimate glimpse of the unimaginable horror she went through, things we could not fathom or imagine, yet very real. I rank this work right up there with the Diary of Anne Frank, and other memoirs of the Holocaust period, like A Jump for Life by Ruth Cyprys.

The Beautiful Days Of My Youth by Ana Novac is a book based on Ana's diary she kept while at Auschwitz and Plaszow. This is not the most well written book but not many 15 year olds could even write while going through the horrendous conditions at Auschwitz and Plaszow. We follow her life through the concentration camps as she is worked nearly to death and fights sickness after sickness until Britain soldiers liberate her camp. Overall the book is a bit confusing at times and a tad boring at times but a book that describes the life of a teenage girl at a concentration camp pretty well.

I thought reading this book was an important experience