One has to wonder if, picking up books at random to read one after another, there is an unseen hand guiding one nevertheless. Having just finished one about a holocaust survivor from Czernowitz, to start this one, about children growing up Jewish in France during holocaust years, is in a way very different, and yet far from a picnic.
French propaganda is nothing if not subtle, and there is simply a general atmosphere one is supposed to absorb that says any discrimination and racism is out of question in France, with its ethos of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. That's just the legend, though. Perhaps there is a sincere belief that it's true. Perhaps there is some effort, too. But mostly there is a denial to the effect that anything contrary is the fault of all but France.
And this is all the more so when it comes to antisemitism and holocaust, as known well enough by now. Chiefly being rigidly indoctrinated by church as institutional doctrine through close to two millennia, leftist doctrine too picks it up for convenience, and thereby the inescapable racism that is blamed on the victims.
One may know all this theoretically, but reading a first hand account of a child is quite another matter.
Chiĺdren being abandoned isn't new, orphans with parents absconding rather than neither alive is a phenomenon known since economy mattered to life and religious institutions brought rigid structures into what is natural. But last century brought in horrors unknown to nature, to life, to humanity, and holocaust forced some parents to hide children by abandoning them to state for protection. These parents hoped the children would survive, somehow, whether they themselves did or not. This is one such survivor child's story, told by her long past her living through it all and overcoming much.
And yet she manages to bring the trauma of the child come very alive. Not aware of where her parents are, or siblings, if any survive, and being alone despite being surrounded in countryside by people, because abandoned children aren't even smiled at much less shown any love or kindness, is only part of it. Realising she had no hope, just when the war ended and everyone else is finally free and happy, was heart breaking. But when suddenly she has her dad come to pick her up, and she finds the people treating her very differently, is the moment she makes come alive too, as she does actually pretty much everything.
To her credit this little girl not only survived but overcame a lot - and with flying all her flags high, too, not giving up on life, love, education, siblings, children, even dancing, and finally her homeland too. One is glad one made her acquaintance.
