Customer Reviews

Until We Meet Again: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Holocaust

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"Until We Meet Again" was a wonderful, true Holocaust story that, in my opinion, ties with "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" as the best Holocaust books.

When two Polish Jews, Meyer and Manya, both 17, and their families decide to go into hiding from the Nazis, there troubles are just beginning. Manya and her 14-year-old brother, Chaim, decide to leave her family's dangerous hideout and go with her boyfriend, Meyer. Together, they go through various hiding places and worsening concentration camps all over Europe. Trying to survive day by day, they often wonder if they will ever be free again. Meyer and Manya survive, however, with their great faith and love for each other - but how? Will they ever see their families again? Can they ever be happy... and free?

This was a great, inspirational story, written by the couple's son. It can be read and enjoyed by a large age group, anywhere from middle schoolers, teens, and adults. It really helped me to see the true horror of the war, and I would highly recommend it!

I can never learn enough about the Holocaust. It surprises me that as much as I've read I always learn something new. UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN is something new. This true story follows a young couple through their experiences in WWII, describing injustices that you may have heard before and ones that you certainly haven't. A candid read that doesn't resort to gruesome retellings, the story of the courage and luck of these two kids blew me away. Suitable for 6th graders and enjoyable for adults.

"Until We Meet Again" by Michael Korenblit and Kathleen Janger, is by far one of the best Holocaust stories I have ever read (which is really saying something because I am Jewish and have heard/read many stories). This nonfiction novel is about the love and survival of Manya Nagelsztajn and Meyer Korenblit in the Holocaust. The story begins at the beginning of the Holocaust where Manya and Meyer lived in Hrubiezow, Poland. The story later develops and takes Manya and Meyer into different concentration camps in Poland. As Manya parted from her parents forever Manya's mother said, "`Maybe one of us will survive'...Well, that was just what happened. Manya was the lone survivor. She resolved that although her family was dead, their faces and her memories of them would live forever inside her heart" (Page 294-295). This novel describes the themes about kindness, equality, racism, determination, survival, hope, and love. In this novel it explains how love can be that tiny piece of hope that makes each day worth living (or trying to live) for. An example is when Meyer said to himself, "There was only one thing he must do: stay alive, so that he could be with her again" (page 216).

Author, Michael Korenblit, is Manya and Meyer's son. His friend is Kathleen Janger and together they helped Manya and Meyer to release the horrors of their past, to share with the world. During the composition of this novel, Michael and Kathleen come across the name of Manya's brother Chaim in a directory of England. The reunion of Chaim and Manya and Meyer was rejoiced, because for about thirty years they each thought the other was dead.

Michael and Kathleen's writing style is quick and to the point. They are telling the story, not to explain to the reader what the Holocaust was, but to tell Manya and Meyer's story. This makes it more intriguing than a textbook version of the Holocaust, "Hitler gained power in Germany as an absolute ruler...the Nazi's killed over six million Jews..." The authors, although tell a story, aren't very descriptive, which is probably due to the fact that they are telling the story second hand.

In my opinion, this is one of the best stories I've ever read. I have heard stories of members from my synagogue, I've seen videos, and I've seen plays about the Holocaust, but by far, this is one of the stories that I've been most interested in. I would not call myself a good reader, I'm far from it, I rarely read outside of school, but this story was entrancing, I had to continue reading and I would not put it down. One of the main reasons why I enjoyed this story so much was because it was a love story as well as a survival story. These two people went through almost every type of Holocaust story I've ever heard of. They went into hiding when people were being deported, they worked in the ghetto, they were deported, they went to work camps as well as death camps, and managed to survive all of it. That concept was incredible. They sacrificed so much, their choices were so concrete, if there was a mistake there was no going back. I agree with Michael Korenblit that the people who survived the Holocaust and were able to continue living, they are the true heroes, the people I want to look up to. I don't see how someone who went through all they went through and survived it would be able to move on. That is why this is such an incredible story. The book "Until We Meet Again" by Michael Korenblit and Kathleen Janger is by far one of the best stories of love and survival ever written.

This is an awesome book. I just finished learning about the Holocaust in a history class, but this put everything into perspective. I usually like books that I can relate to more or that have to do w/ teens like myself, but this is a book that I could never put down, I read it from cover to cover in 2 days! Because of this book, I am looking forward to reading other books that are related to history, it really opened my eyes to a new genre of literature.

I was given this book by a dear friend and am so glad she shared it with me. The story of the survival of Manya and Meyer is one I will not soon forget. This book reads like fiction, so it is easy to forget that the story is TRUE.........and all of the horror and sadness was real. It broke my heart - though the strength of both Manya and Meyer ought to be inspiration to us all. Great read!

This true story of young love and survival during the holocaust is extrememly well-written. It is exciting, sad, triumphant, horrific, almost unbelieveable at times (as the true story is all of these things!) I was very impressed with the quality of the writing, and believe that this story should be read and remembered throughout the ages.

This book was very exciting and shows how two young lovers can triumph threw anything. This book is very inspirational and shows in detail the hardships the Jews had to indure during WWII.

I'll admit that this book started out a little slowly for me, but by about chapter 18, I began to be drawn more and more into the story of teenage sweethearts Manya and Meyer, Manya's little brother Chaim, and their friends (even though the writing style employed wasn't always that dramatic or riveting). The story begins when Manya and one of her brothers, Chaim, make the very difficult decision to leave their family in the hiding place in the wall of their house in the ghetto of Hrubieszow to join Meyer's family hiding in a haystack, in 1942. Perhaps I would have been more drawn into the story initially had it begun earlier on and slowly introduced the characters and situation, instead of starting off rather in media res. And perhaps the events might have come even more alive for me had the book been written in the first person instead of by two secondhand parties. It also kind of kills the dramatic surprise by revealing at the beginning that Chaim was discovered in early 1982, with the reader knowing all along he survived instead of only saving it for the epilogue, when it would have had far greater dramatic effect.

All that said, however, the book does a rather good job at conveying the increasingly trapped and horrific situation the characters found themselves in. Many of the decisions they made, and breaks from outsiders they got which ended up contributing to their eventual survival, could be attributed to only luck, since many other people in similar situations might have had far different fates for making or not making those same decisions. After leaving the haystack, Manya, Meyer, and Chaim returned to the new ghetto in Hrubieszow, where they were put to "legitimate" work, though always in constant danger of brutality and deportations. Sometime in 1943 (the book isn't very good at all about giving a specific timeline of when exactly a lot of this stuff happened), Chaim was taken, and then a bit later on Manya, Meyer, and a few of their friends were deported as well. Initially the young lovers were in the same camp, but were eventually separated, promising to meet again in Hrubieszow at the end of the war. The two of them went through a seemingly endless stream of camps over the next two years, suffering bestial treatments and conditions, but got through with a little help from their friends, and, most importantly, their love for one another. Under such intense times, what would have been just a routine teenage romance in ordinary time turned into something much more serious, emotions magnified as people turned and clung to those they already had a powerful connection to, nurturing and keeping alive the one remaining thing that they still knew for sure, that kept them sane, human, hopeful, normal. It seems amazing to people living in comfort in the present day that love could have survived and even flourished under such awful inhuman conditions, but after reading a powerful story such as this one, it doesn't seem like a surprising phenomenon at all.

This is an extremely good book. We read it in class when we studied the holacost. I thought it would be boring but it was just like fiction with a really good plot and lots of excitement. I diffenitley reccomend this book to people of all ages.

I've had the opportunity to read the book, and meet Michael Korenblit! A great man, a great story. The Respect Diversity Foundation webpage is the place to check into this or get in touch with the author.