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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For those interested in seeing exactly how some Jews survived in small towns across Europe and what some people sacrificed to help them.
Very informative of survival during the Holocaust!!
What a story of survival.I could not put it down.
Clara’s story is both gripping and horrifying. The reader witnesses the extremes of human character in self-sacrifice and cruelty as well as unimaginable endurance drawn from an innate will to live. It is sobering to realize that the events Clara survived occurred less than a century ago, and something similar could happen again.
It was like the Diary of Anne Frank on steroids.
Excellent story based on historical facts
Very good book
wrote a review already. Wonderful! Awesome, night mare, true, beyond be;lief yet totally true. Read it.
A very good book about the experience of a polish Jewish child’s experience during the Haulocaust. A tragic yet inspirational story.
Everyone should know the history of the Jews during WW2. The unthinkable truths changed me and filled me with humility and gratitude for my life
Great book on Natzi era. Good read.
An amazing story.
What these people went through for survival. Horrific! I also learned more about the war and the part the Russians had.
Hard to put this one down: it’s a variation of the Anne Frank experience with multiple Jewish families being protected by their Polish Catholic neighbors. It’s almost beyond belief what they endured.
Just couldn’t finish this. Maybe I judged it too soon, but only got through 2 chapters. It just seemed to drag.
Anyone who doesn’t believe the Holocaust really happened should read this book. Man’s inhumanity to man is clearly shown in this book as are unlikely heroes.
My personal library contains hundreds of books on World War II so when I say “Clara’s War” is one of the very best first person accounts I’ve read, I have much to measure it against. Perhaps not since “The Kersten Memoirs” or Martin Gray’s “For Those I Loved” has a book been so original in its story-telling or so memorable.
At its heart, “Clara’s War” is about friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and what makes survival possible in intolerable conditions. Why do some survive and others not in a situation where every moment is measured against the lowering blade poised above your neck? Why do average people turn on their neighbors and their friends, while others break from the pack and become unlikely deliverers of salvation? And what makes a hero in a nightmarish world where any wrong word, any wrong step can mean execution on the spot?
Teen-aged Clara and her Polish Jewish family lived for 18 months in a pit beneath a house occupied by her saviors, an unlikely family who grew into their role. There were parties — sometimes nightly — above Clara’s head that included drunken German conquerors boasting of their grisly executions. As time wore on, German soldiers were billeted in the house mere inches from the Jews in the bunker beneath. At these times, Clara lived in a hell in which breathing was the only human activity permitted, often for many, many hours on end. No movement, no whispering, no coughing, no eating, no drinking, no elimination of waste — except sweat.
Clara kept a diary and for this history benefits greatly. But “Clara’s War” is much more than a recounting of fact; it is a searching memoir that tests moral quality on every page, that seeks answers to questions of faith, love, and, above all, loyalty.
“Clara’s War” sits in my library next to Eli Wiesel’s “Night,” a position it has richly earned.
captures a true bit horrible time during the holocaust
I absolutely loved this book. The characters were so well written, everything felt real. Definitely a book I’d highly recommend.
Having read several world war II survivor stories recently I found this one to be different as Clara survived by being hidden by a neighbor as opposed to having endured one of the concentration camps. The deprivation, terror and trauma were described in great detail by Clara who was just a young teen at the time of their having gone into hiding. A good read from a different perspective of a survivor.