THE BOOK FAIR

Review:

Halina Birenbaum resided in Warsaw, Poland when the Germans invaded in September 1939.  Halina, the youngest of three children, was ten years old.  The Germans began the onslaught on Warsaw’s Jews first with the race laws, which forbade Jews to use or enter public places such as parks or cafes, then tightened the noose by confining all of Warsaw’s Jews to the Ghetto.  The Ghetto was then walled, separating it from the city.  The Germans then began transporting thousands of Jews into the Ghetto from surrounding areas.  Typhus and dysentery swept through the Ghetto where starvation ruled.

Halina describes a particular incident with vivid clarity:  A young friend of her brother’s sold bread door to door that he could not afford to buy himself.  She recalls how as her mother paid him for the bread, how he stared at the bread, his eyes wide, longing with hunger and remarks how she could not eat it afterwards, unable to forget the hunger in his eyes.  

Halina and her family survived, hiding in attics.  By the time Halina turned thirteen years old, the Germans had decimated the Jews through starvation and disease, and began the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Halina’s father is caught in an unexpected round-up; her mother manages to escape with the kids.  As she last saw her father, he was being beaten and pushed onto a cattle car with hundreds of other Jews, including many young mothers with small children and babies.  Halina, her mother, and two older brothers are caught within a short time; she remembers the fear of not knowing whether they would live or die.  She describes in detail the horrible heat and thirst they suffered on the transport train to the Auschwitz death camp, the lack of air, and the unending stench of filth and dead bodies.

Once in Auschwitz, Halina describes the long wait in endless lines of people, their only desire to allowed inside, her family’s fate, then unknown.

 

Halina Birenbaum’s incredible memoir details her life with her family before and during the war, the time she spent in Auschwitz and a summary of her life after the war.  Highly recommended.