Overview

On 21 July 1942 the Nazis took control of the small Polish town of Zolkiew, life for Jewish 15-year-old Clara Kramer was never to be the same again. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, Clara and her family hid perilously in a hand-dug bunker. Living in the house above and protecting them were the Becks. Mr Beck was a womaniser, a drunkard and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life throughout the war to keep his charges safe. Nevertheless, life with Mr Beck was far from predictable. From the house catching fire, to Beck's affair with Clara's cousin, to the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room just above, Clara's War transports you into the dark, cramped bunker, and sits you next to the families as they hold their breath time and again. Sixty years later, Clara Kramer has created a memoir that is lyrical, dramatic and heartbreakingly compelling. Despite the worst of circumstances, this is a story full of hope and survival, courage and love.

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9780091924416

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Superlative memoir of survival ... Few wartime memoirs convey with such harrowing immediacy the evil of the Nazi genocide ... Her book is a model documentary Daily Telegraph 20080503 Not only a record of terrible deprivation but also a kind of unexpected nobility ... extraordinary -- Margaret Forster Lucidly told with deeply etched personality sketches,thanks to the author's use of her teenage diary, now in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Kirkus reviews This vividly detailed and taut narrative is a fitting tribute to the bravery of victims and righteous gentiles alike Publishers Weekly

Besieged Jews are saved by the most unlikely of heroes in Kramer's Holocaust memoir.The author was 12 in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact divided up Poland and the Soviets marched into her hometown of Zolkiew, near Lvov. Her loving, comfortable family was soon broken up by the brutal NKVD, which arrested her grandfather and all other former Polish officers. He probably died in the chaos following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which ended the pact and brought even more terrible times to Zolkiew. Abetted by native Poles and Ukrainians, the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Gestapo rousted the town's Jews from their homes, deported and murdered them. Her desperate father and two neighbors built a crawl space under one of their houses, but then all Jews were ordered to relocate to the ghetto, which they knew meant certain death. Astonishingly, a man named Beck, a Pole who was an ethnic German - as well as a vocal anti-Semite, an adulterer and a drunk - agreed to help them. He requested the home with the crawl space (the Nazis allotted fellow Aryans the property of displaced Jews), spread a rumor that they had fled and hid the beset, disoriented families beneath the floor of the little house. Cramped and crowded, the grimy bunker was just four-feet high until someone dug a hole in which to stand erect. Among the rules - no talking, no complaining. In their burrow, they could hear boots, gunfire, shouted orders and last cries. They heard the trainmen and German soldiers billeted in the rooms above them. Throughout all this, Beck, often with a bottle in his hand, was constant and kind, providing food and protection for a year and a half. Kramer's sister did not survive. Neither did 99 out of every 100 Jews in Zolkiew. But this surprisingly honorable, truly righteous man saved Kramer and 17 others. The number 18, it should be noted, signifies life in the Jewish tradition.Lucidly told with deeply etched personality sketches, thanks to the author's use of her teenage diary, now in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Clara Kramer is now 81 years old. Based in New Jersey, she founded a Holocaust and Prejudice Reduction Center at Kean University which trains 1200 teachers annually. She still gives talks about her experiences regularly.

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