Gr. 9-12. "I had an uneventful childhood. My family loved me." It's the plain, personal voice that gives this Holocaust memoir its power, the feeling of ordinary people's lives, in all their differences and complexity, forever cut off. High-school readers and adults will get a strong sense of the history through the dual viewpoint: the Jewish teenager who was there when the Germans came to his Polish shtetl, and the adult New York attorney looking back at what he can never forget. Although the writing is direct, almost monosyllabic at times, this isn't for young readers: the brutality is suddenly close-up, just as it was for the boy when he heard that his beloved older brother, his "soulmate," and his father were shot to death and thrown into a common grave, and discovered that his other brother, the one he never liked, was tortured and blinded before he was shot. Hecht and his mother escaped, hiding in the forest, but there's no
Life Is Beautiful innocence in their survival story. Only haunting survivor guilt.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Rarely am I left speechless—but I doubt that I can find the words to describe how deeply moved I was by this Holocaust memoir, a memoir that feels so unlike any other even as it manages somehow to encapsulate them all. What could have been another tale of devastation and desolation is transmuted into an affirmation of the human spirit."
—Lawrence H. Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
"Hecht's book is a valuable addition to the memoir literature on the Holocaust. He bears eloquent and perceptive witness to the hellish world into which he, his family, and his community had been plunged. The book will serve as an instructive source to lay readers as well as to professional historians."
—Daniel J. Goldhagen, professor of history at Harvard's Center for European Studies
