It's funny how sometimes a book about a well known subject can hit the mark and affect you more than any news report of the time. Despite knowing about the horrors of the gas chambers/concentration camps from World War II, this book brought them home to me as never before.
Mostly told from the perspective of Mischa and his sweetheart (then wife)Sophie, it follows events in the Warsaw ghetto between 1937 and 1945. Mischa works with the renowned, and universally loved, Dr Korczak who's methods of teaching children and learning from them see him in charge of an orphanage of, initially, 100 children. He moves heaven and earth to protect "his" children and frequently puts himself in danger. Loved as he is, he is surrounded by others who also want to protect him and his work.
As the war progresses and the Warsaw ghetto is cynically shrunk again and again it takes all of his efforts to keep his charges from starvation and to maintain some lightness in amongst the darkest of surroundings.
When you read at the end how some 900,000 people were gassed at Treblinka in the space of 14 months and that a mere 1% of people survived the Warsaw ghetto it doesn't need a great stretch of the imagination to realise that things aren't going to end well for everyone. However, despite my, many, tears there is a great deal of hope, love and strength within these pages. This is a book that will stay with me for a long, long time.
Mostly told from the perspective of Mischa and his sweetheart (then wife)Sophie, it follows events in the Warsaw ghetto between 1937 and 1945. Mischa works with the renowned, and universally loved, Dr Korczak who's methods of teaching children and learning from them see him in charge of an orphanage of, initially, 100 children. He moves heaven and earth to protect "his" children and frequently puts himself in danger. Loved as he is, he is surrounded by others who also want to protect him and his work.
As the war progresses and the Warsaw ghetto is cynically shrunk again and again it takes all of his efforts to keep his charges from starvation and to maintain some lightness in amongst the darkest of surroundings.
When you read at the end how some 900,000 people were gassed at Treblinka in the space of 14 months and that a mere 1% of people survived the Warsaw ghetto it doesn't need a great stretch of the imagination to realise that things aren't going to end well for everyone. However, despite my, many, tears there is a great deal of hope, love and strength within these pages. This is a book that will stay with me for a long, long time.