And Yet, I Am Here! [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Halina Nelken (Author), Alicia Nitecki (Translator) "It seems that I always kept a diary..." (more)
Key Phrases: state gimnazium, female wardens, evening roll call, Aunt Dora, Star of David, Uncle Ignacy (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews
As a teenager, Nelken, who is Jewish, kept a diary of the permanent destruction of her comfortable life when the Nazis overran her homeland. Unlike Anne Frank, this girl survived the Holocaust to tell the full story. Now an art historian, she was born to a prosperous, assimilated Polish family. And she recalls, with bittersweet verisimilitude, her idyllic early days in Krakowthe people and the pastry, the kitchens and the streets. Moved from home to the ghetto and to ever more confined quarters and constricted living conditions, Nelken goes on to describe the travails of her parents and brother, her friends at gimnazium (when she was allowed to attend school), her work (including enforced street cleaning), and, with special grace, her youthful yearnings and romances. Despite lack of rest and food, she notes the music, poetry, and aspirations she found in the ghetto. ``Somehow,'' she wrote in her diary, ``I hope that something will happen and my life will change for the better.'' Then the ghetto was closed, and Nelken, her mother, and sister-in-law were sent to the Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrck concentration camps, where the likes of Amon Gth, Franz Hoessler, and Dr. Mengele were her keepers. By the closing days of the war, some prisoners were able to escape and, save for her father, the author and her immediate family endured. Her story of purgatory is a lifetime ago and a world away from her present life in academic Cambridge, Mass. But she fulfills a moral obligation to remember the past, while urging us not to heed the ``professional Holocaustniks'' who weren't even there. ``If only,'' she wishes for those who were, I could protect all of us from forgetfulness, individually, as we were, we living people!'' In moving testimony, her legacy is another story snatched from six million. An intelligent and writerly memoir. (16 illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"The book Anne Frank might have written had she survived the Holocaust. Halina Nelken was born into a middle-class and erudite Jewish family in Cracow. As a young girl, she experienced the Nazi invasion of Poland and life both in the Jewish ghetto and in several concentration camps. Her journal accounts of these times are detailed and riveting. Yet what distinguishes And Yet, I Am Here are the reflections Nelken, the adult, makes on her adolescent experience. In blending a nightmarish past with an apparently normal present, Nelken creates an eerily compelling context for her Holocaust memoir." - Boston Magazine "Although the experiences of Holocaust survivors traditionally have been represented by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, Nelken offers a third approach to Holocaust studies that blends diary entries, postwar reflections, and an academician's critique. Drawing from her diary composed over the six-year period 1938-1943. Nelken intersperses occasional comments and reminders of the greater historical context into the text. As a contribution to survivor literature, her work has the making of a classic." - Choice "Nelken's diary is one of the most important to survive from the Second World War. Written by a young girl from a protected and privileged background, it gives a unique and moving account of the Nazi occupation and of the experience of the camps of Plaszow and Auschwitz...There are many memoirs and diaries of the Holocaust, but few with such immediacy and with such a genuine voice" - Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; illustrated edition edition (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558491562
• ISBN-13: 978-1558491564
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,141,931 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Puts the Holocaust in human terms., July 4, 1999

By A Customer

Halina Nelken's book starts slowly - a book anyone over 50 might write about his/her childhood home town--who lived where, what kind of personalities they had, what became of them and their children.... Ah, suddenly it's not so mundane, as so many of these humdrum lives of ordinary people were snuffed out by the Nazis. It is this very ordinariness that serves as a foil for the horrors that Halina Nelken experienced as an adolescent and young woman and writes about - powerfully - in this book. We all know something of what happened in those dark days, but Dr. Nelken makes it personal by telling exactly what happened to her and her family. The book is actually based on the diaries that she kept. Anyone who has seen and appreciated "Schindler's List" should read what kinds of things happened to the people who were not on that list. There are unforgettable moments in this book, such as the young Halina working in an office in Auchswitz and finding a record of the murder of her father. Or the terrible choices she had to make when her mother was too exhausted to continue on a forced march. Only my knowledge that her mother had survived the war made it possible to keep reading this painful account. But, after finishing this book, my overwhelming reaction was that Halina Nelken had taken on the Nazis and won! They tried to reduce her to a sub-human and failed. She came through these terrible experiences without being twisted, without being as bitter as she had a perfect right to be! She not only survived, she survived as a whole person with a sense of humor, a will to succeed, and an ability to relate to other people - even to German people. In a larger sense her book is about the triumph of the human spirit. It is, admittedly, painful to read about the atrocities that took place before and during that horrible war. But we must not ignore the testimony of this strong woman who lived through the things that we don't want to have to think about and came out of it alive and even stronger. Ada M. Prill

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Survivor Literature, June 2, 2008

By	David Meier - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: And Yet, I Am Here! (Paperback)

While the experiences of Holocaust survivors have been traditionally represented by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, Halina Nelken offers a third approach to Holocaust studies blending diary entries, post-war reflections, and an academician=s critique. Drawing from her diary composed over the six-year period from 1938-1943, Nelken intersperses into the text occasional comments as well as reminders of the greater historical context. As a contribution to survivor literature, Nelken's work has the making of a classic.

Nelken's vision of everyday Jewish life in pre-war Poland was/is that of a good life. As for rising Antisemitism in Poland and Germany, it had little impact upon Nelken's sense of her Jewish identity before the war. Following the defeat of Poland, Nelken's family moved into Krakow's Jewish ghetto. In the beginning, Nazi policy towards Jews appeared intent on humiliation rather than as a precursor to extermination. While working at the pharmacy, Nelken became keenly aware of the dangers of being Jewish in Nazi-occupied Europe. Paralleling the story of Oskar Schindler's Jews, Nelken would subsequently be transferred to Plaszow, Auschwitz, and finally, Ravensbrück.

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative, September 25, 2008

By	E. Miller (ME) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: And Yet, I Am Here! (Paperback)

One of the things I liked best about this memoir was the author's description of what her life was like before it fell apart and as another reviewer said the ordinariness of it. It set the tone for the book. I also liked the way she added comments from her perspective in later years to clarify points in the diary. It was a remarkable diary detailing life in the ghetto and work camps. What I didn't like was the feeling of being left hanging when it was over. I wish she had gone into her life after the war. Also, she tended to intimate things that she never clarified but left the reader wondering. I would have rated it higher had she done more with the ending and given some hint of her life after the war.