“Is this a good book for people to read if they are studying the Holocaust?”
“It doesn't really go into a lot of detail, but it's in the background, and it's definitely a different view of that time period than any other book I've ever read. It is a really good book.”
“Absolutely! This book gives you another perspective of the Holocaust- One feels how everyday life was like for a poor German family and how the camps were affecting them.”
“like the other comments, I think it shows a peripheral aspect, that of the average war-impoverished German and their experiences regarding the holocaust. My mother was a teenager then and many of her stories would fit in here; the hunger, the scramble to survive, etc. There was a mentally retarded girl that lived upstairs from her who was sent to an institution. Her parents recieved a letter saying she had died of pnuemonia but they had visited her a week after the supposed date of death so they knew she had been exterminated. Killing techniques were perfected on "mental defectives" before they started killing Jews. Ironically, my mother said the hardest, most desperate times for the average German occurred after the war when the Russians came in and started stripping the country of anything valuable or edible and took anyone with a higher education and sent them back to Russia as slave labor to rebuild Russia. My grandfather was an engineer and that was the impetus for their emigration. They had to escape to the British zone because at that time the U.S. was sending refugees back to the Russians.”
