March/April 1996 issue

Book Review

by Molly Richman, age 11,
Kitanning, Pennsylvania

Click on the cover to order this book

Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries by Laurel Holliday; Pocket Books: New York, 1995; $20.00

Have you ever wondered what the Holocaust was really like?

Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries is an anthology of actual diaries by children which they wrote during the Holocaust. It’s the best book on the Holocaust that I’ve ever read, and I’ve always read every book on the Holocaust that I can get my hands on. However, most of the books that I’ve read are historical fiction, written well after the fact. I like those books, but a book written fifty years later will never be quite as meaningful as the diary by an actual child while the events are going on. I’ve also read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, which I highly recommend. But Anne Frank’s situation was unusual and by itself not a fair representation of the entire Holocaust. Even the fact that her family got to stay together was different, and the Franks had quite a few rooms in their hiding place, whereas most hiding places were simply hidden closets that the Jews could go into during Nazi raids.

I think that this book gives a fuller representation of children in the Holocaust. It has twenty-seven different diaries in it, and each one is unique. There are the diaries of children in work camps, ghettos, and hiding places, of gentiles and Jews, of victims and survivors. Parts of this book are painful, like when children keep saying in their diaries, “I don’t want to die,” yet in the end they are killed. The descriptions of some of the work and death camps are gruesome, but realistic. I don’t think that we should tone down stories of the Holocaust, for if we want to understand the Holocaust, then we have to know what it really was like.

One thing that struck me was that these children all said things in their journals which, if read by the Nazis, could get each of them killed. They told of how they hated the Germans, of the awful treatment they were getting, and of secret plans against the Nazis. Paper to write on was also hard to get. One boy even had to write in the margins of a book. And yet the children still wrote. Some of the children said that the reason they were writing was because they wanted people to believe that the Holocaust really happened. Some of the children wrote as an act of defiance against the Germans, to show that they were not total victims. Others were just writing to keep from being idle.

I was surprised at how calmly the children took all the changes that the war brought. One English boy watched bombings from his front porch and thought them “capital.” I was also impressed by the heroism that a lot of the children showed. One girl even sacrificed her life to save the other members of the squadron that she was fighting in.

I could really relate to the children in this book, even though nothing like what happened to them has ever happened to me. Maybe the reason that I relate to them is that I’m Jewish too. But I think that anyone can relate to these children, for they are human, and for me they definitely put more of a face behind the numbers. I recommend this book to anyone, no matter whether you are already interested in the Holocaust, or if you do not think that you would be. No matter who you are, this book will open your eyes.