Great Reads for Great Readers

 

The Light in Hidden Places, by Sharon Cameron.             Young Adults

 

    

      Countless books have been written on the Second World War, and everyone knows of the atrocities committed by thousands in thrall to Hitler and his Third Reich and his attempts to eradicate every Jew from the face of the earth.  It is common knowledge, too, that more than six million people were ‘exterminated’ because of their racial impurity, their inferiority to all right-thinking Aryans.  Gott im Himmel:  Hitler was trying to do the world a favour!

            But some still clung to the irritating Old Ways, not bothered by the fact that Jews followed Moses as Catholics followed Jesus Christ, and such a one is Polish teenager Stefania Podgorska, who starts her first job in the grocery shop of a Jewish family, the Diamants.  Stefania, nicknamed ‘Fusia’ lodges with her sisters who work in Przemysl and she’s thrilled to be away from the farm, and her mother – the freedom is intoxicating!  And her acceptance into the Diamant family is complete;  she is their new little sister – differing religions are easily accommodated, and all is well.  Until the Germans bomb Przemysl and turn up in person days later with all their weaponry.  And cruelty.  All Jews are rounded up, their businesses closed and apartments ‘given’ to Christians.  They are herded into a ghetto by the railway station, there to wait for the trains to take them to ‘work camps’.  It doesn’t take long before people find out what happens at the work camps.  Hitler’s campaign of extermination has begun.

            And Fusia is outraged that her second family is dragged off to the Ghetto – by great chance, she and her little sister Helena are able to stay in the Diamant’s apartment and it isn’t long before she hatches a plan to aid the people she most loves, first with food judiciously bought and bartered, then – most audacious of all, to help some of them to escape from the Ghetto and hide them in new, larger accommodation (it has an attic that will take a false wall) that she has found on the other side of the city – which is wonderful!  God and the Blessed Virgin have heard her prayers!  She thinks. Until she is ordered to share her accommodation with two German nurses from the Military hospital across the road, who are unaware that there are thirteen Jews hidden in the attic above.  Natürlich.

            This true story reads like a thriller.  The suspense is palpable, even though we know the outcome for, with the family’s permission, Ms Cameron has written Fusia’s heartbreaking, magnificent story as a novel, which has given it all the drama that a historical account would lack.  Stefania Podgorska is a true heroine, named with her sister Helena as  Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, and rightly so, embodying perfect goodness at a time when evil ruled.  SIX STARS.