As librar­i­an of the Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al and Tol­er­ance Cen­ter in Glen Cove, NY, I have read every book about There­siend­stat in my library, but nev­er have I been as moved, emo­tion­al­ly or intel­lec­tu­al­ly, as by Han­nelore Brenner’s book. 

We have in the U.S. our own sec­ond and third gen­er­a­tion chil­dren of Sur­vivors; Ger­many, too, has its coun­ter­part, and Bren­ner is a great rep­re­sen­ta­tive of it. Bren­ner, a print and broad­cast jour­nal­ist, was moved to pro­duce a radio doc­u­men­tary on the his­to­ry of the opera ​“Brundibar” when she was invit­ed to join the sur­vivors of Room 28’s annu­al reunion in Prague. She then embarked on a ten year jour­ney, meet­ing, inter­view­ing, befriend­ing, and being accept­ed by the sur­vivors. She spent years in research, weav­ing the sto­ries of those ado­les­cents around her cen­tral char­ac­ter, Hel­ga Pol­lak, thus memo­ri­al­iz­ing all the girls who did not sur­vive. The girls formed a close group, influ­enced by the bril­liant and car­ing coun­selors who guid­ed them and intro­duced the con­cept of ma’agal (cir­cle), a court sys­tem that encour­aged the girls to be car­ing and con­sid­er­ate. Bren­ner observes that thanks to all the intel­lec­tu­als and tal­ent­ed peo­ple gath­ered in one ghet­to, and because they decid­ed that these chil­dren would be edu­cat­ed and pre­pared for their ​“futures” by who­ev­er had not been deport­ed, the chil­dren became bet­ter edu­cat­ed than Chris­t­ian chil­dren, whose edu­ca­tion was per­vert­ed by Nazi dog­ma. With Brenner’s book, the read­er becomes one with those girls, shar­ing their uncer­tain­ties but also, from time to time, their pleasures.