The Lost Childhood

November 1, 1989
Dispossessed early in WW II by the Russians, Nir's affluent Polish family endured the German occupation and persecution as Jews by pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Ukrainians. After the father's murder, the 11-year-old author, his mother and 16-year-old sister escaped deportation to extermination camps by developing skills of rapid improvisation, and using forged identities and disguises. A tale of hair-raising adventure and countless hardships, this is also a candid, moving and sometimes funny account of a sensitive boy's crisis-dominated adolescence, which, while fraught with normal longings, included his serving as a courier in the fetid sewer system during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising. Russian liberators who freed the family from slave labor on a German estate, then accused them of collaboration with the Nazis, forcing the three to flee once again--this time back to Poland.

August 1, 2007
Adult/High School-Nir was nine years old in 1939 when his father was shot by the Nazis, and over the next few years, many more of his relatives, friends, and neighbors disappeared under similar circumstances. In order to survive, Nir's mother took him and his sister to Warsaw and disguised them as Catholics. Days were spent in constant fear. By 14, he had learned about blackmail, sex, the tense relationship between Germans and Poles, and the obvious cruelty of war. He joined the Polish Armed Forces to help with the uprising, and in the final year of the war, he and his family became prisoners of war at a German work camp and later at a German farm, still disguising their Jewish identities. Nir posits that their survival was part perseverance and part luck, and firmly believes that forgiveness of the Germans is not possible. How can it be, when one witnessed all manner of human cruelty, from neighbors betraying one another to Nazis shooting innocent children in the street? The book was first published in 1989 (Harcourt); with this edition, Nir's story is complete for the first time. It includes passages more appropriate to mature readers not in the edition adapted for young readers (Scholastic, 2000) as well as newly updated front matter."Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada"

Copyright 2007 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 2, 1991
Nir, whose affluent Polish family endured the German occupation and persecution as Jews, suffered the murder of his father and fled with his mother and sister to escape deportation to an extermination camp. ``A tale of hair-raising adventure and countless hardships, this is also a candid, moving and sometimes funny account of a sensitive boy's crisis-dominated adolescence,'' said PW.

Starred review from December 17, 2001
To the burgeoning shelf of outstanding Holocaust memoirs, Nir, a New York City psychiatrist, contributes this stellar account of how he eluded capture as a Jewish boy in Poland during WWII. His story, previously told for adults in a 1989 book with the same title, recalls Louis Begley's Wartime Lies
in its rapid chronicling of daring ruses, hairbreadth escapes from Germans and anti-Semitic Poles, and the everyday snares threatening the narrator's attempts to pass himself off as Catholic. At one point, he admires his older sister's ability to "continually mastermind escape strategies that would have made Houdini jealous"; Nir himself appears to have shared that talent. Readers will admire his quick thinking and bravery. The author shifts easily between the perspective of childhood and adolescence and the psychological insights of a rigorously attentive adult. For example, describing his involvement in the Polish partisan uprising that ended in the razing of Warsaw, Nir writes: "Paradoxically, I could cope with this constant onslaught of painful and dangerous experiences at age fourteen, not so much because of my strength but because of the very fact that events followed each other so rapidly. Before I could ponder one situation, I was wrestling with another." Unflinching in his depiction of brutality and suffering, Nir is also empathetic in his acceptance of the feelings of his young self. His book merits—and rewards—serious attention. Ages 14-up.