True life account of a woman who, as a small child, grew up in occupied Poland during the second world war, hidden most of the day for years when Jewish children were feared taken away and murdered by the nazis - although the writer points out more than once and with good reason too, that to say nazis instead of Germans is merely a political correctness bordering on fraud. She points out that those that did it had been brought up German, and those that later denied being nazi nevertheless did not give up the identities and whereabouts of the war criminals hiding in plain sight, even when their crimes were neither unknown nor in question.
This child's parents were eventually taken away, presumably to Treblinka where most of those in the neighbourhood were, and murdered as were all others. She was protected by those that did remain, and survived, miraculously, not only the hiding for hours but subsequently the slave labour, the camps, the abominable conditions and starvation, the witnessing of the massacres and burning of humans in camps where the ashes from chimneys fell in the strawberry fields that the concentration camp children were supposed to pick for the Germans but not eat. Thus the title.
Cipora was to survive, later find other Jewish people including children when she was finally back in her neighbourhood, even some relatives including a brother who had fled to Russia and survived in Siberia, and then migrate to Israel via refuge in camps in Germany and France. Even post the losing of war, she describes how a German policewoman inspecting trains treated her unfairly, inhumanly, not with counrtesy or correctness but rather with terrorising tactics, for a crime (or rather what in the era of deprivation post war was a crime) committed by a German couple sitting next to them - which fact was testified to by the rest of the occupants of the train compartment.
The account of the life in Poland close to Russian border and elsewhere is very detailed and alive, and brings the whole horror home, of how the local Polish were only too eager to follow the nazi diktats long before Germany occupied Poland, and how they were not happy to see any Jews survive, as often as not. How German occupation dehumanised Jewish population, how the Jews survived only by fleeing across the river to Russia or else by miracle or chance, and more. Some not very publicised details too, such as Ukrainian and Cossack troops were used for the horrors perpetrated in neighbourhoods, by Germans and Russians later; how Red Army occupation was a breath of relief for the short while after war when the Jews were yet to migrate to Israel, and the various specific stories of Jewish families in Poland and later in places where she stayed for short while during migration to Israel.
One is glad Cipora survived, had a life despite the horrors she suffered, and lived to tell the tale. And too, that she was forthright, not politically correct in that she did not deny the horrors unlike the friend of her husband who provoked her into a rage by accusing her of falling prey to propaganda against Germans, or choose not to tell.
It is all too well known a phenomena how victims who survive can be too traumatised to accept it all happened, and when treated with a bit of honeytrap by the tormentors, can either forgive or deny it all. This happens on personal level, and politically it is often convenient. Nevertheless such denial is a lie, a falsehood, a fraud perpetrated not only against the victims of past but the innocent of the future who are denied truth thereby.
