By ATLEE K. CHAIT
"Tell Me Another Morning" is Zdena Berger's story of surviving the Holocaust. She was in her mid-teens when she and her family were deported to Nazi death camps. Berger wrote her book when she came to America in her early 30s; it was first published in the early 1960s. She calls the recently released edition an "autobiographical novel" in which "all events are based on facts."
Berger was born in 1925 into a Czech-Jewish family who lived in Prague until the Nazi Occupation in 1939.
In the book, Berger is the 15-year old girl named Tania who guides readers through her extermination camp experiences.
The reader learns about the hard labor Jewish prisoners endured, the days of the seemingly aimless death marches ordered by the Nazis and countless days without food.
The most devastating revelation that the novel clearly describes, is the months and years of waiting that the Jews went through just to find out if the Nazis would allow them to live.
The "green ones," better known as Nazi soldiers, could decide a person's fate by saying the simple words "left" or "right."
It was astounding for me to read about how much agonizing the prisoners went through just to hear a single word which, in turn, decided their fate.
Tania definitely grows up throughout the course of the book, but Berger does an amazing job of showing how Tania keeps her values with her even when everything around her is falling apart.
There are two characters in the book who are Tania's closest friends, Ilse and Eva.
All three have conspicuously different personalities and morals from each other but their individual personalities were what help them work together to eventually beat the odds and survive.
Tania is pressured into doing certain tasks that she doesn't want to do, but she holds her ground and learns from all the hardships she endures. Every day that she survives the life in the concentration camps, she becomes stronger, and each experience adds up to make her the person she is at the end of the novel.
This novel is very moving and well written but younger children may not be able to handle its context based simply on their previous knowledge of the Holocaust.
While reading, there were times that I found myself crying because the descriptions of some of the events were so heart-wrenching.
There were other times when I wondered why certain information was included in the novel.
In the end everything ties together and, looking back, every piece of information was needed to help me understand the true meaning of the novel.
Despite the fact that I have been to the Holocaust museums in both Washington D.C and Israel and have heard many stories told first-hand, this book was a real eye-opener for me.
When visitors go to a museum they typically read about statistics and how people died. Visitors may also experience reading a page out of somebody's diary but nothing compares to reading a novel such as this one which looks at the daily progression of someone's life from the beginning to the end of the war.
Multiplying this story of one individual by the "five million killed in the gas chambers" is unimaginable.
I would highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys learning and reading. Hopefully the generation growing up today can learn from the past and prevent atrocities such as the Holocaust from occurring in the future.
Zdena Berger was imprisoned at Terezin, the town in the north of Czechoslovakia in which the Nazis created an extermination camp where, by some estimates, only 132 of the some 15,000 Jewish children of Czech heritage imprisoned there, survived. She was also imprisoned in Poland at Auschwitz, the Nazi's largest death camp, and in Germany at Bergen-Belsen where Anne Frank died a few weeks before the arrival of British Forces on April 15, 1945. It is estimated some 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust including some 1.2 Jewish children. Berger and her husband live in California. You can read an interview with her at http://www.parispress.org/level02/books/tellme.html
Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is observed both in the United States and in Israel. It remembers both the victims of the Holocaust and the underground resistance movement against the Nazi deportation of all the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/
Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, www.yadvashem.org
Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center, www.hatikvah-center.org
National Yiddish Book Center, yiddishbookcenter.org