Reading any memoirs of the holocaust, or for that matter a book based on those times and those events, is hard enough. This one is by someone who was a little girl of ten by the time the horrors began, and the book begins with memories of the home of the family in Prague by the little girl, albeit written and published much later. The memories are of a beautiful life in a beautiful home, a large house on the hill in Prague, filled with music and more, with wealth of the educated, accomplished and the connoisseur, rather than wealth of the aristocracy which may or may not exercise their choice of ability to accrue all those qualities. The family moreover is of a mixed marriage, with a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, with much love and complete harmony.
This somehow makes for more horror for the reader who knows and dreads the subsequent events that will affect this family, their beautiful home and beautiful life filled with music, concerts, friends and family. Fortunately this family survived, by selling much of their prized possessions or using some to bribe whoever needed to be, to emigrate on the eve of the horrors descending on the world, centred on the continent. They managed to survive, do well, educate the children well, and live, in US.
But this only makes for a contrast when viewed in context of the family and friends and more that were lost due to not being able to, or in some cases, not choosing to, migrate as they did. A very moving moment is when the author, then still a young girl coping with high school in the new land, is asked by her father to accompany him to a synagogue for the first time - she is brought up Catholic - and mentions how the Rabbi asked if anyone lost a family member in the holocaust. She raises her hand, and looks around to see the whole congregation doing the same. They rise, sing prayers for the dead, all weeping.
It's a tale of life, survival and prospering of a few on the background of the six million or more that did not, and as such all the more poignant - for, obviously, if these people did so well, so could a large part of those that did not survive, and this loss of human potential and of quality was all because the lumpen that the perpetrated the events intended to wipe out human civilisation and all its achievements, in name of racial supremacy.
That another ideology in name of equality of all did much the same to a large proportion of the world population behind respective curtains of the totalitarian nations, only makes it worse. One is, of course, happy these good people did survive and did well.
