This book had me in tears; a beautiful love story in bewildering and tragic circumstances, all the more poignant for being based on real people and real events. Elisabeth Gifford has done meticulous research into the story of a Polish doctor who transformed ideas about child care in a similar passionate and novel way to Maria Montessori's views on education.
The doctor runs orphanages in which his ground-breaking ideas are applied and he attracts enthusiastic workers and students. The young love between two of these, Misha and Sophia, develops into a strong relationship which provides them some hope and there are many other close relationships between characters we grow to love, many of them the children in an orphanage within the Warsaw ghetto.
The ghettoisation of Jews in Warsaw and many other cities occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War was not realised by practically anyone at the time to be an inevitable step toward genocide. This still permits a suspenseful tone to the book even as we move inexorably toward an outcome we already know.
The map at the front of the book and the author's notes at the end are illuminating and have inspired me to find out more.
The doctor runs orphanages in which his ground-breaking ideas are applied and he attracts enthusiastic workers and students. The young love between two of these, Misha and Sophia, develops into a strong relationship which provides them some hope and there are many other close relationships between characters we grow to love, many of them the children in an orphanage within the Warsaw ghetto.
The ghettoisation of Jews in Warsaw and many other cities occupied by the Nazis in the Second World War was not realised by practically anyone at the time to be an inevitable step toward genocide. This still permits a suspenseful tone to the book even as we move inexorably toward an outcome we already know.
The map at the front of the book and the author's notes at the end are illuminating and have inspired me to find out more.