How sad

I remember reading the Diary of Anne Frank when I was a young girl. I have read many more books dealing with the holocaust as a teen as an adult, and what these innocent people were put through. To this day I will never understand how people can do what they do to other human beings. For Nanette to suffer the way she did and have to spend time alone in the concentration camp once her mother and brother were transferred elsewhere speaks volumes as to what kind of person she was. I was very happy that she was able to survive those deplorable conditions, though he had a long road to recovery once freed from Bergen-Belsen. For her to go on with her life, get married and have a family of her own was very nice to read about. I will continue reading books of this nature but I know I will never understand the cruelty these people endured. ( )

What was so disturbing about this book is that it was a memory about a very ordinary family. The dad worked at a bank, the kids went to school and they all led a very normal life....Until the disruption and horror brought to Holland by the Third Reich. Even then, the family thought that they would be safe until they were sent to a temporary camp where they started having their dignity gradually stripped away. Minimal food, poor hygiene and constant orders from the SS soldiers. The temporary camp was bad enough but when the family was moved to Bergen-Belsen, they lost all vestiges of their earlier life. Once they were there, it was a daily struggle to stay alive. The author presented the horror of the camp in such as way that it was even more horrific. I am so glad that the book continued to the author's years after her time in Bergen-Belsen and we were truly able to see what a strong determined woman she was.

Thank you Nanette for sharing your story and continuing to share it with future generations so that this never happens again.

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own. ( )

Nanette’s book may be short on pages (only 166 pages) but it isn’t short on courage, bravery, and determination. Nanette’s family were just a normal family living in Amsterdam. Nanette was only 11 years old when her world was knocked off-kilter – Hitler invaded Holland. It was after the segregation of the Jews into their own schools that Nanette met Anne Frank. Nanette attended Anne’s 13th birthday party and witnessed the moment when Anne received her diary. In late September 1943 Nanette, only 14 at the time, her 16-year-old brother, and her parents were rounded up, loaded onto a train, and sent to Westerbork work camp. Westerbork was a transitional camp where Dutch Jews were held to be deported to an extermination camp. Then in February 1944 Nanette’s entire family was deported to Bergen-Belsen.

Remarkably, it seems Nanette was able to write her memoir while detaching herself from the anxiety and agony she had to have experienced in her life. This allows the reader to get through her story without totally breaking down. How had Hitler managed to transform a “civilized society” into such monsters! Each day – no, each hour – was a struggle to survive, to live to see another hour, another day. Nanette says they felt as though they had a committed a crime for simply being alive. They had to survive not only the Nazis, but also typhus, lice, starvation, winters.

Somehow after all the horror of the camps and the loss of her family, she survived and opened her heart to others. She married and started a new family. And eventually she knew she had to tell her story. How painful that must have been the first few times she told it. And keep in mind that she was only 20 years old when she left the camps!

One of her quotes that really hit me hard was “When people hear my story, they ask me if I ever felt depressed, but I tell them I did not have time for that. After all, I needed to survive.”

I recommend you read her book and bear in mind that “the price of freedom is everlasting vigilance.” ( )