This is a true story of the experience of a 12 year-old boy from Czechoslovakia in the Holocaust. It covers Moshe Kessler’s childhood, life during the war and in concentration camps, and life after the Holocaust. Holocaust stories are always really sad but are important to read and remember. I liked this book and read it in one sitting.
Nearly all the gentiles in Moshe Kessler’s community quickly turned on their Jewish friends when discriminatory rules were put in place and then Jews were gathered to be sent to concentration camps. Moshe credits this shift in part to growing resentment of the Jewish people’s financial success in the previous two decades under Czech rule. I understand how watching Jewish neighbors get wealthier and not share their wealth would be frustrating for people who are living in poverty. But it still seems crazy that people would turn on their neighbors and friends so much, to the extent that Moshe’s neighbor simply pointed and laughed at him when he returned from the concentration camps a year later.
I can’t imagine going through what Holocaust victims and survivors went through; I had nightmares from just watching a video from a concentration camp at a Holocaust museum when I was eight years old. They had to adapt to having death and suffering all around them and just focus on surviving. Moshe describes how everyone was dehumanized and he couldn’t feel anything while at the camps and for a while after the Holocaust.
Near the end of the war, Moshe got sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, which assigned some political prisoners to oversee Jewish prisoners. Antonin Kalina used his influence as a political prisoner to save hundreds of Jewish boys, including Moshe. In one instance, Kalina saved the Jewish children by dressing the Jewish children in the clothes of dead political prisoners, burning the records of the dead political prisoners, and then telling German authorities that there were no remaining Jewish prisoners in his block. Kalina took many other risks and steps to protect and save the Jewish boys. It really is an amazing story.
Moshe discusses how some of his friends and family dealt with trauma after the Holocaust, including a striking anecdote about his aunt and uncle. His aunt and uncle lost all three children in the Holocaust, moved to the U.S., and had a son. That son first learned that his parents had three children die in the Holocaust when he was an adult, after his parents passed away.