Hidden: A Sister and Brother in Nazi Poland - Rilegato

Faiga and Luzer Rosenbluth's mother and father and two little sisters were among the Jews herded into Kanczuga's synagogue that day - but the family had managed to hide the two older children. Hidden is Faiga and Luzer's story, told with an intimacy and quiet particularity that make the incomprehensible enormity of the Holocaust immediate, human, and devastatingly real.
In alternating first-person narratives, this memoir takes readers into the siblings' very different but inextricably linked experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland. Faiga, whose fine appearance once marked her as a dignified young lady from a good home with servants and a seat by the eastern wall of the synagogue, spends two years wandering the perilous countryside, wearing a Christian name and shabby clothing, hoping to be taken for a peasant. Mere miles away, knowing nothing of his sister's fate, Luzer, the leather wholesaler's only son, lies silent all day in the stifling dark corner of a barn, where the smell of the cows' warm hides are a piquant reminder of his lost world. Hidden deftly summons that world, as the familiar comforts and squabbles of life in a well-to-do, religious Jewish family are slowly overwhelmed by the grim news coming out of Germany. We follow Faiga and Luzer through the early forebodings and deprivations of the war, into hiding among righteous Poles and erstwhile neighbors-turned-betrayers, and finally, at war's end, back once more into the world - but not necessarily into safety. Told in a confidant, clear, and unsentimental prose, this is a story of heroism and tragedy writ large and small, of two young people coming of age in a world in chaos and then trying to return to "normal" after experiences as unimaginable as they are unforgettable.