A Candle in the Heart

Plot

Judith Mannheimer Alter Kallman has written a compelling memoir, the story of a young child from Slovakia, who survived with only some of her siblings and has but dim memories of her parents and the beauty of a privileged. pious childhood. We journey with Judith from her native town through temporary havens and momentary respites into Hungary, before the German invasion of March 1944 and then spend the final year of the Holocaust in German-occupied Budapest in a race between survival and death. Along the way we meet Jews who saved Jews, people who embraced a young, cute child as their own, and others who turned their backs, so frozen by the dangers of their own situation that they could not care about an orphaned girl. The richness of the story is enhanced by the extensive description of the aftermath of the Holocaust; the kindness of Jews in England and then in the early years in the State of Israel, where Jewish children were raised and rehabilitated in villages which healed the body and nourished the soul.