Kasia annoyed me many times but I was satisfied with the end. I guess the author tried to make her as real as possible, but after all, she went through I understand.

This is the kind of book I wish I had the courage to write--a profound, unsettling, and thoroughly captivating look at sisterhood through the dark lens of the Holocaust. Lilac Girls is the best book I've read all year. It will haunt you.' Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet And when she discovers these letters from another woman, not her mother, hidden amongst her father’s things? The clothes one was to take care of proved to be dirty rags, infested with lice, which were according to Swedish standards too worn down to be worth cleaning. The consequence was that it was all burned. Many survivors protested, but few dared to say why. They dared not believe we were fully without German influence. We had been too naïve and unsuspecting. Inseams, hems, and waistbands, many had with great effort and danger for life during internment in camp managed to save personal souvenirs and treasures. Now, when liberation was a fact, they lost these very last objects from their original lives. [46] I was also surprised by the many conversations recounted in the book. Were these conversations an invention of the author or reconstructed from a survivors' memory? While the conversations certainly added to the readability of the book, they are questionable as reliable facts.When I was 22 and at university studying for my education degree, I attended a session in which I heard my first Holocaust survivor testimony, a man who lost his parents and all seven of his siblings in the camps, who survived Auschwitz, immigrated to Canada and for forty years never spoke to anyone about his experiences during the war. Although his closest friends knew that he was Jewish, he never told them he was a survivor of the Holocaust. He only decided to talk when the stories of Holocaust denial began to surface and he realized that he no longer could be silent. During the Q&A, a young man, a history major, asked " As a Holocaust survivor, which film "Schindler's List" or "The Pianist" has done a better job of telling the story of the Holocaust survivor?" You can imagine that all 100 people, including myself, leaned in to hear what he would say because of course we had watched those films. He thought for a long moment and said " Honestly, if Hollywood were ever to make a movie on what we all went through in those camps, no one in Canada or the United States would ever want to see it." But Caroline's world is forever changed when Hitler's army invades Poland in September 1939 - and then sets its sights on France.

I protagonisti sono innanzitutto Miriam: tedesca, vive a Berlino negli anni della caduta del muro e si trova ad accudire il padre Henryk, ormai in fin di vita a causa di un ictus. Many prisoners perished or were gunned down if they showed weakness on these marches over long distances under guard. But nine courageous women, who had already endured torture and barbarity and were now labourers making armaments at HASAG Leipzig, made a daring escape from the serried ranks of women marchers and managed to survive, largely thanks to their support for each other.Contemporaneamente alla vicenda di Miriam, l’autrice ci racconta la storia dal punto di vista di Henrik, professore universitario. Siamo nel 1942, il paese sta precipitando nella morsa nazista, gli ideologi e i dissidenti politici finiscono in campo di concentramento; l’incontro e l’appassionante innamoramento con Frieda una studentessa promettente e appassionata non fa che accelerare la rovina per lui e per la sua amante che continua a frequentare sotto gli occhi di Emilie, una moglie terrorizzata ma non rassegnata a lasciar andare il marito. This centers around Miriam who is the present day character, more so than focusing on the past and Henryk. Miriam is not only given more chapters than Henryk, but her chapters are also notably longer. The dictation of Miriam's chapters typically either focus on her repetitive inquiry into the letters she found that are related to her father (Henryk) -or- her personal life and the problems that she has with her abusive husband. Henryk's chapter's typically focus on his own marital problems rather than the historical context that he experienced. Moving. . . . Absorbing. . . . When acts of resistance are described, inspirational.” — The New York Review of Books

December 1989. The Wall between East and West Germany is open. Miriam is taking care of her dying father. Caroline, an American actress with ancestral ties to France, who works in the French Consulate in New York. The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldier should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt." The author shows us every facet of this camp, from its opening in May 1939 till its fall in April 1945. It would be a major camp, with thousands of prisoners and thousands of deaths, and every evil of the Holocaust would visit: slave labor for German war industry, hideous medical experiments involving gangrene, forced sterilization, starvation, and mass murders by shooting, mistreatment and a gas chamber. We learn that the prisoners included large numbers of children, and babies born in the camp (almost none of the latter 600 would survive). We learn of the SS custodial and medical staff, and of camp society: its informers, collaborators, resisters, prisoners consigned to the "slum" section of camp. From an original body of German women prisoners the camp would take in every nationality and group set out for maltreatment, notably French women, Jews, Soviet women prisoners-of-war, Gypsies. We learn that the story doesn't end well: Swedish bus evacuations in 1945 arranged by Count Bernadotte but often strafed by Allied aircraft; the camp itself overrun by Soviet forces and the surviving inmates raped. It's all set out in readable (if horrific) detail -- this may very well be the definitive story of this place.

Four such survivors— Jadwiga Dzido, Maria Broel-Plater, Władysława Karolewska, and Maria Kuśmierczuk—testified against Nazi doctors at the Doctors' Trial in 1946. Sherman, Judith, & Carrasco, Davíd. (2005). Say the Name. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 9780826334329 One thing I don't agree with at all is the positioning of the book (via the blurb and the title) as being about the 'rabbit girls' of the concentration camps. These women were experimented upon by doctors in the camps who gave them less respect or care than a vivisection rabbit. And yet, from the point of view of the story, they are a really tiny aspect of a much broader discussion. Anybody with a morbid interest in the abuse of inmates in that way should probably find another book and I consider it a shame that the book is being promoted in this way. Perhaps we're supposed to view Miriam as a rabbit girl in her own right, abused by her husband for 20 years, but I suspect I'm attempting to force-fit a title to a book.