A SUSPENSE-FILLED PAGE-TURNER OF A TRUE STORY

I just finished a terrific book that I’m telling everybody I know about. The reader of “Survival in the Shadows: Seven Hidden Jews in Hitler’s Berlin” by Barbara Lovenheim is plunged right into the tense situation of the survivors -- and their non-Jewish saviors, who risked their lives to feed and hide their neighbors, and to help in other ways. Interspersed is some history of the era, with the many-faceted view it gives of “ordinary” Germans, many of whom behaved in extraordinary ways.

The author’s sensitive interviewing of the survivors and the rescuers whom she met many years later – and their keen memories for their ordeal – bring the reader right into this gripping story, which also has its moments of levity, like the time two of the women got all dressed up and walked into an SS Christmas party. They carried off their adventure so well that they had to deal with an unexpected dilemma: one of the SS officers wanted to walk one of the women home.

I’m looking forward to the dramatic movie that must put these events on the screen. Till then, readers are rewarded by getting to know these courageous and resourceful survivors and the people who saved them.