Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust [Hardcover]

Maxine B. Rosenberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 18, 1994 | Grade Level: 5 and up

First-person accounts of fourteen Holocaust survivors who as children were hidden from the Nazis by non-Jews.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 5 Up-This anthology tells the stories of 14 Jewish children who were hidden by non-Jews during the Holocaust. Despite the different settings-Poland, France, Belgium, Lithuania, Germany, and Holland-these first-person accounts show that the survivors share vivid memories and feelings that still haunt them. Rosenberg spoke with each of them, but unfortunately narrates their recollections in an understated, matter-of-fact style with a sameness that obscures the highly individualized nature of each experience. Still, the heroism of the people involved makes for compelling reading. Milton Meltzer's Rescue (1991) relates similar stories from the viewpoints of the youngsters' rescuers, while his Never to Forget (1976, both HarperCollins) includes some stories of children who were hidden along with many other first-person survivor accounts. Elaine Landau's We Survived the Holocaust (Watts, 1991), Ina Friedman's Escape or Die (Yellow Moon, 1991), and David Adler's We Remember the Holocaust (Holt, 1989) all deal with the subject from the perspectives of young people who were saved by hiding as well as those who escaped from camps; there are also many full-length memoirs that cover the same territory, sometimes with more dramatic impact than that found in Rosenberg's book. Despite its stylistic uniformity, this volume, illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the subjects, is an adequate addition for libraries without comparable titles in their collection.
Jack Forman, Mesa College Library, San Diego
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gr. 5-10. The telling is restrained; there are no histrionics in these 14 first-person accounts by Jewish Holocaust survivors who were hidden from the Nazis as children. In fact, some of the narratives are almost flat; it's as if the speakers don't want to make a fuss, as if the suffering is too unbearable to talk about. The survivors are Americans now, most of them in their fifties and sixties, remembering. Each oral history includes a heartbreaking photo of the child and family in wartime and then a photo of the survivor today. A brief postscript summarizes what the child didn't know at the time and what has happened since to the survivors and those who hid them. Perhaps because the speakers are adults looking back, their accounts don't have the immediacy of the child's viewpoint that makes Ida Vos' Hide and Seek (1991) so compelling. Nor do these stories have the candor and the graphic intensity of Greenfeld's Hidden Children.

The drama here is in the children's relationships with the righteous Gentiles who saved them. It's an inspiring story of ordinary people who risked death to rescue strangers. They hid children for all kinds of reasons, some of which they didn't know themselves. They created secret hideouts in convents, in homes, in chicken coops. These quiet accounts also make you imagine what it must have been like for the child who spent months crouching in a hayloft, who had to hide that he was circumcised, who was suddenly wrenched from his parents. One survivor does remember how he felt as a teenager ("I wanted to be with girls. I was furious that I wasn't able to. I hated being locked up"). Or there's the woman who remembers her reunion with her father in the U.S.: when he finally recognizes her, "he hugged me so tightly, I was nearly black and blue." Remembering is hard. Hazel Rochman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 166 pages
• Publisher: Clarion Books; First Edition edition (April 18, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395650143
• ISBN-13: 978-0395650141
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, March 10, 2006

By 

M. Hudgens "mhleigh" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust (Paperback)

I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book- I am a history teacher, with World War II being a time period I am particularly interested in, so I read books along this vein quite a bit. My soft heart particularly likes to read works describing how, even in the midst of a horrible time period, there is still goodness to be found, and stories of individual heroism. I also learned quite a bit, particularly about how often siblings were split up to make their hiding easier (I guess I have read too many books like the Diary of Anne Frank and the Upstairs Room where siblings were together and didn't think about all the times families/siblings got split up during hiding.) It is also a very short book (about 150 pages) and so a quick and worthwhile read.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A little bit sad..., April 29, 2003

By 

adrienne (Peoria, Il) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust (Paperback)

Maxine Rosenberg, does a wonderful job of editing the heartbreaking non fiction stories of people who thrived during the Holocaust in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In Hiding to Survive, victims of the Holocaust tell about their tragic life stories. Each of the 14 people who share their past experiences were young children during the Holocaust. They had to leave their family in one way or another and learn to adjust to new settings and a new environment. Some of these people even went as far as to deny their Jewish heritage and religion. It is unknown how many Jewish children actually survived or escaped from the Holocaust. On the outside, this book is just a group of people telling their life stories. But if you look into it, it teaches you to never take your family, or anything for that matter, for granted.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hiding to Survive, February 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Hiding to Survive: Stories of Jewish Children Rescued from the Holocaust (Paperback)

I am an 11 year old sixth grader. Hiding to Survive is a book about hidden children during the Holocaust. In the first area of the book, there is a small summary about the Holocaust and hiding. Paulette Pomeranz is the first hidden child to be written about. This is a very good book if you want to know something about hidden children. The bad part is that there is no telling if they died or not. That's a vital piece of information. I liked this book because I really care about people and I want to create World Peace 1!