The Craftiest Workshop

Last year I wrote about Remembering How to Remember. This year, to get into a mindset of remembering, I have been reading some historical fiction about prisoners that lived through the Holocaust.

Sometimes social media advertising can be a good thing. I kept seeing an advertisement for “Three Sisters” by Heather Morris. Looking through titles recently added by my library on Overdrive, I saw the title and decided to borrow it to read online.

I was very glad I did. It was a story of three sisters taken from their homes in Slovakia and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It entailed all the horrors they witnessed and then went on to tell what happened to them afterwards. Although it was written as a fictional story, the author spent time with the real-life sisters hearing their stories first hand.

This led me to read “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” by the same author. It was her first book written in the series told through the eyes of a male prisoner. He manages to get a prestigious position; a safer job than most that were offered to prisoners. He also managed to fall in love with a female prisoner.

One passage from the this books really struck me. Any clothing or belongings of those arriving on the trains were taken to certain buildings to be sorted. These buildings were called Kanada (Canada) buildings. The workers sifted through the articles setting aside anything of value. The Tattooist asked another man how the buildings got their name and he said:

The girls that work there dream of a place far away where there is plenty of everything and life can be what they want it to be. They have decided that Canada is such a place.

Morris, H. (2018, p. 121). Tattooist of Auschwitz . Harper Collins

Throughout the books there are dates, just month and year. The part of the book where the Tattooist meets Dr. Josef Mengele is the same month that my mother was born in Canada. It just makes you think about how big the world is; in one place horrific experiments are being done on people and in another a family is having a normal life, celebrating the birth of a new baby girl.

There is one more book in the series about a girl that ended up being the kept woman of the camp commandant. It is entitled “Cilka’s Journey” and I plan to read it some time in the near future. The three books have overlap and the main characters show up in the other books.

The movie “Schindler’s List” came out in 1993, a year after I graduated from high school. I recall leaving the theater after watching it with a sick feeling in my stomach. I had tears rolling down my cheeks. I spent hours with the two friends that I had seen it with talking about it. These books came to life for me in a similar way that that movie did.

While I recommend these books, I would caution you not to read them at night before bed or you will have trouble sleeping…I won’t do that again. Make sure you have tissues nearby as you will need them.

As you read about what people suffered during World War 2, it gives you a stronger sense of what the brave men and women from our country were fighting to stop and prevent from happening again in the future.