Customer Reviews

Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions

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This fascinating book of personal essays by Chicago-based writer Sandi Wisenberg covers a wide range of subjects--Holocaust subjects such as Herschel Grynszpan, Hannah Senesh, Margot Frank (Anne's sister), and Kurt Waldheim, as well as the author's personal and family life, her Jewishness, visits to Paris, Mexico, and Central America, Yiddish classes, Franz Kafka, and race relations in Chicago.

The book's title comes from her early years growing up in Texas in the 1960s when she and her sister used to hide in the closet and imagine the Nazis were coming to get them. "You immerse yourself in descriptions of horror," she writes about her childhood. "You stand in the library aisle in the World War II-Europe section and thumb through familiar pages. You stare at the photographs of the skeletons, compositions you've memorized. You watch your tears make little dents, like tiny upturned rose petals, on the pages."

Early on Wisenberg became aware of her distant relatives who perished in Europe. "The ones left behind in Kishinev, in Slutsk, in a little shtetl near Kovno called Pusvatin: great-grandparents and great-great uncles, cousins three and four times removed."

Wisenberg writes about her Second Generation friend in Skokie, Illinois, who reads to his ailing mother every day from Mila 18, the Leon Uris novel about the Jewish Ghetto Uprising. "His father was in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, his mother was drifting through Poland on her own, twelve years old, and then surrendered herself at a work camp." With all of his grandparents dead and his parents speaking English with thick Yiddish accents that his classmates made fun of, he "felt like a stranger in this country, an outsider, outside the lives of other Jewish Americans." When Wisenberg tells him she feels the same way, he jokingly asks her, "Are you a victim without a Holocaust?"

The author's obsessive connection to the Holocaust gives this book its most intense and compelling moments.

Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

While it is clear that Wisenberg's essays offer a personal, intimate account of the absorbing, traumatic nature of such a horrific and atrocious event in human history, her message to young readers is reductive at best. The "Holocaust Girl" who is imaginarily thrust into the role-call line in a Supermarket certainly has a right to be overwhelmed by the collective memory of which she identifies, and perhaps traumatically overidentifies. (I am writing a thesis on the Holocaust and see cattle-cars instead of trains). But Wisenberg's book unfortunately creates an exclusive historical identification that ignores the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust--that is, an obligation towards the other not as an object but as a subject. What kind of lesson is it for young readers to read about a girl so immersed in her own memorial suffering that she fails to treat those immediately surrounding her with recognition and compassion? This girl, wallowing in her own history, unfortunately misses the point entirely when she doesn't smile or offer her kindness to that check-out girl or that man in line behind her. It was that sort of attitude, which substitutes a myth for a visible reality, that enabled millions of Germans to look the other way as millions of Jews disappeared from within their midst.