Claiming My Place: Coming of Age in the Shadow of the Holocaust

Amazon.com Price: $17.99 (as of 09/05/2019 03:42 PST- Details)

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Description

A Junior Library Guild selection

Claiming My Place is the true story of a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Nazi Germany and hiding in plain sight.

Meet Barbara Reichmann, once referred to as Gucia Gomolinska: smart, made up our minds, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. A Jew growing up in predominantly Catholic Poland all through the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future. Her world is turned upside down when Nazis invade Poland and establish the first Jewish ghetto of World War II in her town of Piotrko´w Trybunalski. As the war escalates, Gucia and her circle of relatives, friends, and neighbors suffer starvation, disease, and worse. She knows her blond hair and fair skin give her an advantage, and sooner or later she faces a harrowing choice: risk either the uncertain horrors of deportation to a concentration camp, or certain death if she is caught resisting. She comes to a decision to hide her identity as a Jew and adopts the gentile name Danuta Barbara Tanska. Barbara, nicknamed Basia, leaves at the back of everything and everyone she has ever known in an effort to claim a new life for herself.

Writing in the first person, creator Planaria Price brings the immediacy of Barbara’s voice to this true account of a young woman whose unlikely survival hinges upon the same determination and defiant spirit already evident in the six-year-old girl we meet as this story begins. The final portion of this narrative, written by Barbara’s daughter, Helen Reichmann West, completes Barbara’s journey from her immigration to The us until her natural, timely death.

Includes maps and photographs

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