Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs

This story was written by my distant cousin and explains what life was like during the Holocaust and the horrors she suffered. It is quite moving.

Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller recounts her girlhood years as a Jew during World War II, spent in increasing poverty and restriction and in the midst of horrid cruelties. Born in the shetl of Skala in Poland, in what is now Ukrania, Mrs. Heller was 15 when, in the middle of the night, the Germans arrived to round up the town's Jews. Any Jews captured were herded out of the town, forced to dig their own graves, and shot--among them, Mrs. Heller's grandparents. Her grandfather, first one in the family captured by the Germans, led them to the hiding place of his wife, among others, in the hope of saving his own life, but was forced to watch their deaths and then killed. Mrs. Heller survived because her adored father had constructed a hideaway for their large family. But that night began four years of increasing privation: near-starvation, the desperate search for someplace to hide or someone to hide them, loss of family members, grotesque cruelties by the villagers. Mrs. Heller's admirer, Jan, a Gentile carpenter, first hid her at his house, then arranged with a former employee of Mr. Gottesfeld for the immediate family of four to be hidden at a farm. Their food and their accomodations became increasingly restricted, until they spent several months in a space behind the chicken coop, so small that if one moved, all had to move; they starved, lying in their feces and covered with lice. Mrs. Heller also recounts the story of her developing love for Jan, and the strange turns that war brought to that love. Mrs. Heller writes beautifully. The engrossing story moves quickly, but retains the details and descriptions that vividly portray the shtetl, her family and their saviors, and the extreme privations they suffered. She is unstinting in her portrayals of wartime, telling us the worst as well as the best; but all of it in a matter-of-fact way. It was a privilege to read this book and spend a little time with this remarkable woman.