Alicia Appleman-Jurman

Alicia: My Story

Bantam Books (Dec 01, 1989)

9780553282184

| Mass Market Paperback

448 pages | 107 x 175 mm | English

$ 0.50 | Value: $ 0.50

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Dewey * YA 738.799 Ap

LC Classification Young Adult

Genre

Young Adult / Nonfiction / Biography

Plot

After losing her entire family to the Nazis at age 13, Alicia Appleman-Jurman went on to save the lives of thousands of Jews, offering them her own courage and hope in a time of upheaval and tragedy. Not since The Diary of Anne Frank has a young voice so vividly expressed the capacity for humanity and heroism in the face of Nazi brutality.

From Publishers Weekly
A young girl's experience of the Nazi pogrom in her Polish hometown is related with an immediacy undimmed by time in her autobiography. In 1942, the author and her family undergo a brutal separation. Thirteen-year-old Alicia escapes her captors, fleeing through fields and woods, encountering fellow refugees and occasionally finding safe harbors. Although she sees her mother's wanton murder and endures physical and mental deprivation, the teenager is supported by faith in family and in the goodness of people. Capable of rallying others, she eventually heads a group who settle in Palestine. In 1949, she marries an American in Haifa and moves to the United States. Long and on occasion rambling, her story contributes to an infamous history as a tale, not only of survival, but of active resistance to oppression. Major ad/promo.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
A Polish Jew, the author re-creates her efforts to survive in Nazi-dominated, war-torn Poland. Between the ages of ten and 15, she suffered terrible hardships and encountered numerous brushes with death. This is a potentially useful addition to Holocaust literature, for although she never experienced the death camps, Appleman-Jurman lived in constant peril and managed to survive only through an extraordinary combination of luck and street sense. Unfortunately, the heavy use of dialogue reconstructed more than 40 years later has an unsettling effect on the mood and plausibility of this interesting and frequently horrifying survival narrative. Still, public libraries should consider. Mark R. Yerburgh, Trinity Coll. Lib., Burlington, Vt.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Value

Retail Price	$ 0.50
Value	$ 0.50

Notes

Alicia's story is one of the most compelling memoirs of Holocaust survival I've ever read. It's a young girl's personal story, and non-political. Yet her experiences intimately document the political upheaval during the War years in Eastern Europe. Alicia was still a child in 1939, but she already knew that being a Jew in Poland meant living with anti-Semitism. So, when the Red Army took occupancy in Eastern Poland, it was not necessarily a hardship for her. The Soviets established schools, which were taught in Ukrainian and Russian. Alicia would discover in the coming years how necessary those language skills would be for her survival. The horror began with the German invasion and the murders of her father and brothers. Barely escaping with their lives, ten-year-old Alicia and her mother fled east, eking out a desperate living while avoiding the predators all around them. Their erstwhile Polish neighbors were quick to betray them to the Gestapo and its collaborators, the Ukrainian police. More dangerous and difficult to elude were the Banderovcy, marauding nationalist guerillas whose slogan went: "With the Jews we'll begin and with the Poles we'll finish!" Assuming alternating identities of an orphaned Polish or Ukrainian peasant girl, Alicia managed to get enough field work to provide food for herself and her mother. Invariably though, her deception would be revealed by so small an oversight as forgetting to Cross herself before eating, and she and her ailing mother would have to flee anew. Then her mother was captured and shot by the Nazis. Alicia, completely alone, began to care for starving orphaned Jewish children even younger than she. By coincidence, she was able to assist a band of Russian partisans escape execution and was subsequently decorated as a Soviet heroine. The documents she received from the Red Army, and the friendship of the Russian Jewish soldiers who became her protectors, would ensure her survival for the remainder of the War. With the retreat of the German forces, Alicia began her perilous new role as a guide with the Brecha, a Zionist underground railroad. Using her partisan documents, she smuggled displaced Jewish refugees through the Soviet checkpoints and onto boats headed for Palestine. Ahead would be still more hardship... Alicia now travels to schools, synagogues, and churches in the US, telling her story of Holocaust survival. I wholeheartedly recommend her remarkable memoir for teens and adults alike!