18th April photo - book I am reading

This is the book I am reading at the moment and I can say without a doubt that it is my top 3 books that I have ever read. This is my 3rd time round and I never fail to be amazed at the fortitude of the victims of the Holocaust. This book was recommended to me by my tutor at the time (Arim Grunbacher - whose parents were children in Germany during the war), when I was doing a module for my degree on European History and I am so glad that I was able to track it down.

The author Marc Roseman had interviewed Marianne Strauss in his role as historian at Southampton University to hear about her experiences during the war. After she died her son contacted Marc to say that he had found a large trunk of his mothers documents relating to the war and would he like to see them. What he found was the most fantastic record of Marianne's past and what was even more remarkable was that these had survived at all, because as a Jew she was constantly 'on the run' during the war. This book has constructed her tragic war experience from these amazing documents.

There were formal documents and passes but the most poignant were the love letters between her & her boyfriend Ernst from his incarceration in a concentration (death) camp. Also recorded were the Gestapo's report on how she escaped from them when they came to round up her family - she just ran through the front door while they were down in the basement, but she did not have time to say goodbye to her parents and brother and she never saw them again.

Frustratingly she did not tell the author about any of this when she was alive and I kept wishing that she had told him, so that he could have found out more - but as he very succinctly put it at the end of the book - had she wanted to share this with him she would have done. Survivors have many different ways of coping with the horrors they faced and in Marianne's case she dealt with it by only talking about minor matters and keeping the worst memories buried deep inside her.