Such Good Girls

July 7, 2014
Of the 1–1.5 million Jewish children living in Nazi-occupied Europe, only 6–11% survived the Holocaust, many of them in hiding. Veteran writer Rosen (Psychobabble) devotes the first half of this book to telling the stories of three girls—one Polish, one French, and one Dutch—who endured sudden name changes, loss of Jewish identity, fear of being denounced, and frequent relocation. He also relates what happened after all three resettled in the U.S. after the war. In the book’s second half, Rosen addresses hidden children’s lingering emotional wounds, their issues with religious and ethnic identity, and their attempts to find each other, which began in the late 1970s. Rosen also discusses issues the few other authors who have previously written about this population have neglected, such as sexual abuse in hiding. A fine writer with a good sense of pacing and drama, Rosen sometimes tries to cover too much too quickly and, near the book’s end, he errs in maintaining that child survivors “are like the victims of a rare, incurable, ambulatory disease with no visible symptoms.” Yet these are relatively minor flaws in an otherwise valuable contribution to the literature of one of the less-discussed aspects of the Shoah. 16-page b&w photo insert.

September 1, 2014

Rosen (A Buffalo in the House) begins this heartbreaking tale by describing how he became acquainted with Sophie Turner-Zaretzky, a retired radiologist and one of thousands of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust by disguising their Jewish identities. Her story led Rosen to two other women, Flora Hogman and Carla Lessing, whose harrowing accounts also make for a dramatic telling. Later, Rosen moves beyond their individual histories toward the wider experience of Hidden Child Survivors, and how their psychological scars often prevented them from confronting their past and telling their stories. In the 1980s, the Hidden Child Survivors started sponsoring international conferences, which often acted as therapy sessions for the now aging population. This allowed the experiences of these formerly hidden children to become widely discussed and available to historians through such institutions as the Visual Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. VERDICT Rosen, who is primarily a novelist and poet, tells the story of these women and the varied community of survivors with sensitivity and genuine affection. General readers will enjoy the book, while a scholarly audience will not find anything startling new.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll.

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