Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs

Important as both a family history and more broadly, as a contribution to the Holocaust record, this memoir, unflinchingly told more that four decades after it occured, details what can happen in the most extreme and dire of human circumstances. "The unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger led to acts of desperation among many who survived; some stole, others lied and schemed. Still others took comfort in intimate relationships that might be considered illicit or misguided in ordinary times. It was not all pure and righteous, but it happened." Also a story of interfaith compassion, the author and her family were hidden by the efforts of a non-Jewish couple and a sympathetic Ukrainian militiaman at the risk of their own lives. Their developing relationship and the harrowing events that followed lend the book an immediacy and jolt so many years later. Fanya Heller's subtle depiction of her parent's knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them; their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, leads us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances - as father, mother, or daughter.