And Yet, I Am Here!

by Halina Nelken

Book Overview

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious fifteen-year-old, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions in Krakow deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. This remarkable book tells the story of Nelken's experiences in the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558492925
• ISBN13: 9781558492929
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Informative

One of the things I liked best about this memoir was the author's description of what her life was like before it fell apart and as another reviewer said the ordinariness of it. It set the tone for the book. I also liked the way she added comments from her perspective in later years to clarify points in the diary. It was a remarkable diary detailing life in the ghetto and work camps. What I didn't like was the feeling of being left hanging when it was over. I wish she had gone into her life after the war. Also, she tended to intimate things that she never clarified but left the reader wondering. I would have rated it higher had she done more with the ending and given some hint of her life after the war.

Survivor Literature

While the experiences of Holocaust survivors have been traditionally represented by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel, Halina Nelken offers a third approach to Holocaust studies blending diary entries, post-war reflections, and an academician=s critique. Drawing from her diary composed over the six-year period from 1938-1943, Nelken intersperses into the text occasional comments as well as reminders of the greater historical context. As a contribution to survivor literature, Nelken's work has the making of a classic. Nelken's vision of everyday Jewish life in pre-war Poland was/is that of a good life. As for rising Antisemitism in Poland and Germany, it had little impact upon Nelken's sense of her Jewish identity before the war. Following the defeat of Poland, Nelken's family moved into Krakow's Jewish ghetto. In the beginning, Nazi policy towards Jews appeared intent on humiliation rather than as a precursor to extermination. While working at the pharmacy, Nelken became keenly aware of the dangers of being Jewish in Nazi-occupied Europe. Paralleling the story of Oskar Schindler's Jews, Nelken would subsequently be transferred to Plaszow, Auschwitz, and finally, Ravensbrück.

Puts the Holocaust in human terms.

Halina Nelken's book starts slowly - a book anyone over 50 might write about his/her childhood home town--who lived where, what kind of personalities they had, what became of them and their children.... Ah, suddenly it's not so mundane, as so many of these humdrum lives of ordinary people were snuffed out by the Nazis. It is this very ordinariness that serves as a foil for the horrors that Halina Nelken experienced as an adolescent and young woman and writes about - powerfully - in this book. We all know something of what happened in those dark days, but Dr. Nelken makes it personal by telling exactly what happened to her and her family. The book is actually based on the diaries that she kept. Anyone who has seen and appreciated "Schindler's List" should read what kinds of things happened to the people who were not on that list. There are unforgettable moments in this book, such as the young Halina working in an office in Auchswitz and finding a record of the murder of her father. Or the terrible choices she had to make when her mother was too exhausted to continue on a forced march. Only my knowledge that her mother had survived the war made it possible to keep reading this painful account. But, after finishing this book, my overwhelming reaction was that Halina Nelken had taken on the Nazis and won! They tried to reduce her to a sub-human and failed. She came through these terrible experiences without being twisted, without being as bitter as she had a perfect right to be! She not only survived, she survived as a whole person with a sense of humor, a will to succeed, and an ability to relate to other people - even to German people. In a larger sense her book is about the triumph of the human spirit. It is, admittedly, painful to read about the atrocities that took place before and during that horrible war. But we must not ignore the testimony of this strong woman who lived through the things that we don't want to have to think about and came out of it alive and even stronger. Ada M. Prill