Burned Child Seeks the Fire

By Cordelia Edvardson

Book Overview

A] searing memoir. . . . An enduring, indeed universal, story.
Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe

Summoned with her mother to Gestapo headquarters in 1943, fourteen-year-old Cordelia Edvardson was given a terrible choice: to acknowledge her secret Jewish heritage and suffer the consequences or to see her mother charged with treason. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is the true story of the love between this mother and daughter, and a piercing example of the tragedies wrought by Nazi Germany.

"A lacerating, beautifully translated memoir."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Mesmerizing. . . . Has] the concise unreality of a horrifying fairy tale."
Thomas Frick, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Behind Edvardson's] deceptively simple prose is a complex and tragic story."
Judith Bolton-Fasman, Newsday

"Cordelia Edvardson's defiant tone challenges us to eschew simplified encounters with the literature and experiences of Holocaust survivors."
Paul H. Hamburg, Jewish Book World

"To see the horrors of the Holocaust through a child's eye is to experience hell. Cordelia Edvardson's astonishing story captures, with a terrifying reality, a child's response to the myriad atrocities of the Nazis and their murderous regime. Burned Child Seeks the Fire is compelling, horrifying, poetic in its intensity."
Deborah Peifer, Bay Area Reporter

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807070955
• ISBN13: 9780807070956
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A book for adults, politicians, analysts.

This is not a book for children. Rather it is a recollection of images and perceptions of the adult/child who survived the camps of World War Two to tell the tale. Cordelia Edvardson is a humanist who wants the world to abolish all that is inhumane most especially when it comes to children. She knows what its like to be taunted, terrified and have a tortured soul. A must for every policy maker, teacher, and whoever still believes in preserving a sane world. glenys sugarman

WOW!

This was just a great book. No books that I've read on this subject have been quite so compelling!

A powerful and moving memoir

The author mesmerizes you with the simplicity and eloquence of her writing. She moves you with her childhood, her courage in the camps and the power of her spirit in returning to choose life again.