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Unveiled Shadows: The Witness of a Child

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Young Ingrid Kisliuk survived the Nazis in Vienna, Austria and again as her family found refuge in Belgium. While the events of this period are well-known, what is special about her autobiography is that she uses a Socratic dialogue to contrast the details of her story as a hidden child with the questions an inquiring adult mind raises in hindsight. She is able to give us a detailed recollection of her extended family's daily life: how they lived and work and hid from the expanding presence of soldiers and anti-Semites. One episode tells of the raid of their Brussels apartment, a cramped garret studio. Downstairs was a basement workroom where her father did piecework crafting rabbit skins into toys. Hearing soldiers arrive on their block she and another family member scurried into a cupboard in the workroom and escaped being captured. The author describes this trauma and many other equally stressful and dangerous times and how she thinks and feels about them today. She analyzes the motivations of the other people in her life then: why did they make the choices they did? Ingrid Kisliuk's memoir is a courageous personal history, a document of World War II and a valuable contribution to Jewish history.