The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months In Auschwitz and Plaszow
Grade 7 Up.  A brilliant, literary memoir. At the age of 15, Ana Novac (nee Zimra Harsanyi) recorded these impressions during six harrowing months in Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps, from June to November 1944. Of the eight camps Ana passed through, she remembers only these two. She wrote on strips of German propaganda posters torn from the walls and on sheets of toilet paper. She hid the pages in her shoes and memorized them when they grew too bulky, summarizing them with a few key phrases. In each camp, she angled to get the top sleeping platform to take advantage of the dim ceiling light. Sophie, her camp "sister," thought she was crazy, but nevertheless helped her conceal the scraps of paper. Ana wrote about the horrors, the narrow escapes from death, the ludicrousness of the situation. She described her camp "family" in hilariously on target, if "sick," metaphors. She wrote about the "angel-makers," the women who saved pregnant women from the gas by aborting their fetuses or by delivering their babies and then disposing of them. She observed, she thought, she wrote, she existed. Like Gerty Spies, an older woman who also found her salvation in writing (My Years in Theresienstadt [Prometheus, 1997]), Novac's will to write was stronger than her body's will to die and so she survived. We are gifted with this work of art, this word tribute to the human spirit.?Marcia W. Posner, Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center of Nassau County, Glen Cove, NYCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.