This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer’s diary of her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people.
Clara Kramer was a typical Polish-Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara’s family was taken in by the Becks, a Volksdeutsche (ethnically German) family from … German) family from their town. Mrs. Beck worked as Clara’s family’s housekeeper. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families.
Eighteen people in all lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks’ basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she spent in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable life—from the house’s catching fire to Mr. Beck’s affair with Clara’s neighbor; from the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp.
Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent col-lection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
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Unbelievable! Everyone should read it.
This book should be required reading in schools so we as a nation never ever forget the horrors of war.
A great testimony of the perserverance of a young girl and her family in a terrible situation.
It reminded me that I need to be grateful for all I have!
Very good book.
The story is about “survival” and hiding from the Nazis in WWII. Many people live in a bunker underneath a home owned by really good Polish people who are against the killing of non-Aryan people. Really great story and it is true.
IT WAS A TRUE STORY.
An A+ read for those few of us who can appreciate the horrors of genocide.
Excellent
Inspiring. Great survival true story
True story well told.
I learned a great deal about the holocaust from reading this wonderfully written memoir.
Loved this book!
Not my favorite holocast book. Really was rather dull and not well written
Tense, heart rending account of the author’s experiences as a pre-teen Jew hiding from the Nazis during WWII.
It was amazing. Even after reading Ann Frank I had not understood the depth of horror inflicted by the Natzies.
Very amazing they survived. Hard to imagine what they went thru.
What this family had to endure is unthinkable. But it shows you what FAMILY and LOVE of GOD can achieve.
Being a true story, it was very sad to read what Clara went through. There were a lot of characters to keep up with. The people that befriended Clara and her family were the bravest of all.
Loved it