Life Lines
Malcolm Elliott reviews a moving account of what it was like to be Jewish in Hitler’s Germany
Some things in life are just beyond our imagining. What it was like to be faced with the gas chambers and ovens of Buchenwald is, mercifully, not in our own experience and, for most of us, the nightmare belongs to past history. Yet the fact of the Holocaust, and the fate of six million men, women and children, must not be forgotten if we are to ensure that such evils never recur. Ruth David knew the reality of these things in her own childhood. She endured daily rejection by her non-Jewish classmates and the horrors of Kristallnacht, when windows, crockery and furniture in her home were smashed. Her father and eldest brother were arrested, beaten and taken to Buchenwald. Local villagers trashed everything, including the preserves her mother had carefully stored on the pantry shelves for winter. Her parents eventually perished in Auschwitz in 1942.
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