Dimensions
153 x 235 x 30mm
Edgar Award-winning mystery novelist R. D. Rosen takes on the real-life puzzle of what happened to the generation of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in hiding. He tells this silent, forgotten generation's story through the lives of three girls hidden in three different countries-among the less than 10 percent of Jewish children in Europe to survive World War II-who went on to lead remarkable lives in New York City. In absolutely true stories that often defy belief, and with a novelist's touch, Rosen follows Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, Flora Hogman, and Carla Lessing from Poland, France, and Holland, where they escape the Nazis, to America, where they elude their many ghosts, struggle with the ordinary lives they never knew as children, and manage to succeed miraculously as doctors and psychotherapists helping to heal the wounds of others. The "Such Good Girls" of the title alludes both to the discipline and luck the women required in order to survive Hitler's Final Solution at all, and to the admirable adult lives they made for themselves-and still make-in their adopted land. One of the girls, who survived by living with her mother as antisemitic Catholics right under the noses of the Nazis in a Polish resort town, didn't even know she was Jewish until she was 11. Another, who lost both her parents by the time she was six, was protected by nuns and a succession of good Christians, spent the next decade looking for her identity, and eventually became one of the first psychologists to study the very generation of haunted children she belonged to. The third girl in Such Good Girls was concealed with her family in a Dutch apartment, much like Anne Frank, but with an entirely different outcome. Whatever the circumstances of their survival, the hidden children who had learned to keep their mouths shut in order to go on living continued their silence for decades after the war, suffering from their own isolation and the indifference of older survivors who didn't even want to hear their stories. Rosen recreates the dramatic event in 1991-the first significant gathering of hidden child survivors ever-where Sophie, Flora, and Carla's lives finally intersect, and where a large contingent of this silent, and silenced, generation tearfully began to make peace with their disastrous childhoods. In tracing the three girls' journeys from imminent death to laudable lives, Rosen brushes against some of the lesser known, and often unsettling, aspects of the world of Holocaust survivors-including the child survivors' difficulty confronting their own pasts, the competitiveness among survivors over who suffered the most, survivors' lifelong religious confusion, as well as shocking revelations of child sexual abuse, even within Jewish families. At times frightening and disturbing, Such Good Girls is still more than anything an inspirational book about survival with a capital S and the human capacity to turn unimaginable tragedy into personal and moral triumph.
