The Secret Holocaust Diaries
April 12th, 2010. Filed under: WILD Cards.
It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old…or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
and the book:
The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister
Tyndale House Publishers (March 4, 2010)
***Special thanks to Vicky Lynch of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. for sending me a review copy.***
Nonna Bannister was a young girl when World War II broke into her happy life. She went from an idyllic early-twentieth-century Russian childhood, full of love and comforts, to the life of a prisoner working in labor camps—though she was not a Jew—eventually bereft of her entire family. But she survived the war armed with the faith in God her grandmother taught her and a readiness to start a new life. She immigrated to America, married, and started a family, keeping her past secret from everyone. Though she had carried from Germany the scraps of a diary and various photographs and other memorabilia, she kept it all hidden and would only take it out, years later, to translate and expand her writings. After decades of marriage, Nonna finally shared her secret with her husband . . . and now he is sharing it with the world. Nonna died on August 15, 2004.
Visit the author’s website.
Product Details:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers (March 4, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1414325479
ISBN-13: 978-1414325477
ISLAND BREEZES
When most people think of a holocaust diary, they think of The Diary of Anne Frank. This is a very different book, because Nonna and Anne are very different people.
Nonna came from a privileged Christian family. Her family had wealth and possessions that we might find hard to imagine today. Her grandfather was a member of the Imperial Cossack Army assigned as part of the Imperial Protection Unit to protect the Tsar and his family.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, things gradually went downhill for the family, although they were still among the privileged. That still didn’t save Nonna and her mother Anna from being sent from the Ukraine into Germany as slave laborers.
This incredible witness to the attrocities of the Holocaust was kept secret for many years, even from Nonna’s husband for over fifty years. Nonna managed to keep diaries all during the war by hiding them in a small pillow she kept fastened to her body.
This is not a quick read. There is much to absorb. My heart grows heavy with the knowledge of what so many endured. As a child I was taught about the Holocaust and The Diary of Anne Frank was required reading, but it was not as much of a blow to the heart as Nonna’s revelations.
As an adult, Corrie Ten Boom’s writings became part of my library. Still, that didn’t leave the impact as these diaries of Nonna. Maybe it’s my life’s timing. Join me as I finish this book. It should be required reading in our educational system. The Holocaust has become too far removed. It’s incredible that something of that enormity is being denied by some.
There’s nothing more to say as I’ve become engulfed with emotion. Time to get back to my reading.