The Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust
The Allied bombing of Hamburg saved Ingram’s family from their imminent deportation to the death camps. The anti-Fascists also saved them, and so did the vicious local anti-Semitism: denied access to the shelters (“for Aryans only”), Ingram was unharmed when the shelters were bombed, and thousands of civilians were killed in the firestorm. With such bitter irony, there is no slick relativism about the Holocaust in this stirring memoir, but the personal viewpoint confronts the history seldom told, including the horror of tens of thousands of German women and children slaughtered by the Allied firebombing. And Ingram is candid about the shocking postwar anti-Semitism (“Genocide succeeded and attitude remained”) and about prejudice in the West. Her triumph is that finally in the U.S., she moved—unlike many survivors—beyond victim identity to activism in the civil rights movement, where she was passionate about nonviolent resistance to racism. With lots of full-page photos of the Hamburg firebombing, this important historical account is bound to spark discussion. Pair it with accounts of the firebombing of Dresden. --Hazel Rochman