Among the Reeds: The true story of how a family survived the Holocaust (Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII Book 1) By Tammy Bottner

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Rating: 9.3 (9227 reviews)
Author: Tammy Bottner

Kindle Store,Kindle eBooks,Literature & Fiction Among the Reeds: The true story of how a family survived the Holocaust (Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII Book 1) Tammy Bottner

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A young Jewish mother. A Nazi occupation bent on genocide. A heart-breaking decision that will tear a young family apart. Belgium, 1940. Melly Bottner is just eighteen with a three-week old newborn son when the Nazi occupation of Belgium begins. She and her young husband Genek live in fear as it becomes obvious that all Jews will soon be taken. Watching friends and neighbors disappear as the Germans carry out their shocking purge, the young family confronts an awful truth: if they are to survive, they must rip their own family into pieces.In this biography from Melly's point of view, author and granddaughter Tammy Bottner delivers a true and moving family memoir. This meticulously written and researched account brings to life the horrific decisions Bottner’s grandparents had to make simply to survive. Through their monumental choices, Tammy Bottner's grandparents ensured the survival of their family and made their post-war reunion possible. Among the Reeds is a deeply personal family memoir that is part-biography, part psychological observation of the extraordinary wartime lives of a persecuted people. If you like true stories of courage, heart-stopping near misses, and tear-jerking choices, then you’ll love Tammy Bottner’s compelling account. Buy Among the Reeds to discover an astounding tale of family endurance today.

At this time of writing, The Ebook Among the Reeds: The true story of how a family survived the Holocaust (Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII Book 1) has garnered 8 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Ebook is Good TO READ!

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This is one of the most interesting Holocaust biographies I've read. It was even more interesting because, out of habit, I read it the way I read books in high school, skipping prologues or forwards and getting to the main story as quickly as possible. If you like to read that way too, stop reading this review, order the book, and do the same thing. Otherwise what follows is a spoiler, though that's what the prologue is in a sense consciously meant to be.Reading the book the way I did, I thought the people in it must have been interviewed by a ghost writer. Their voices seemed absolutely true, though sometimes a little too poetically descriptive, given their backgrounds. But their brutal frankness about their feelings, their disappointments, their regrets is unnervingly palpable - I say this as someone who spent 25 years as a family therapist listening to people's pain. One feels the rigidness of the society they live in, in which a mother's response to the near rape of her 17 year old daughter is to marry her off to a complete stranger whom the daughter seems to detest, yet who she stays with for over four decades, bitter all the way. A man who, though they are in hiding from the Nazis, forces himself on her repeatedly during the war so that twice she becomes pregnant at a time when there is too little food for the two of them.And yet at least with respect to their first child, Tammy's father, Bobby, they are doting, loving parents, despite their conflicts with each other. Melly, the mother, manages to have an abortion the second time she becomes pregnant, but can't the third time and so, as with two year old Bobby, she and her husband Genek place Irene, their daughter, with strangers, asking the doctor who delivers her to deliberately make a scar on her leg so they can identify her after the war.They have amazing hair breadth escapes from destruction. Melly, who passes for German, is stopped by a German officer who asks to look in her handbag when she is in the process of smuggling sugar on the black market, a crime punishable by summary execution. Keenly attuned to the character of those around her and what they'd like to hear, she confesses half the truth - that she stole it for her the child she is expecting. The child has already been born, but the officer does not know that and simply sees her expanded waist. Convinced she is a good Deutscher frau bringing new life to the Fatherland, he lets her off with a warning.And it's clear by war's end they have become nearly as emotionally cold and brutalized by their life underground as the people whose anti-Semitism forced them into hiding. Locating the people who had taken in their new born daughter as their own, believing her real parents had been killed in the bombings, Melly and Genek show up unannounced and demand the adoptive parents hand her over on the spot, ignoring their daughter's own screams and the sobs and protests of the older couple. Not a word of thanks for loving and caring for their child, not a wits concern with their daughters' emotional attachment. As an adoptive father who spent several weeks getting to know my daughter and her foster family before taking her home, letting her get used to us, it was hard to read this section, even if the events are somewhat understandable. But I was less troubled by "let's get this over with, she's ours," than with their utter indifference to anyone's feelings but their own. This became magnified when Melly tries to hug little Irene, who responds as any normal child in such a situation would respond - she becomes a stick. Melly, wounded, emotionally rejects her for the rest of her life. I didn't tuck her in to bed, I didn't kiss her, she says. Then what was the point of ripping her away from the first people she had known who had loved her? This is not a criticism of the book or Melly's story. One of the real achievements of Bottner's work is that she recreates these wrenching dilemmas vividly, and we are left as readers to struggle with them ourselves. What would we have done? How would we have handled such an awful situation any better?War's end does not end Melly's unhappiness. It remains part of her for the rest of her life. She is unhappy before the war, she is unhappy in hiding, she is unhappy liberated. "My motto," she says early in this work, "is schver bitter lieben. It is a hard and bitter life." I have rarely seen such personal anguish so well expressed.It was only when I finished the main story that I went back to the prologue and learned that the beautiful voices I'd been reading belonged to Tammy Bottner, Melly's grand daughter. Suddenly it all made sense - the sometimes too poetic language - given the speaker, and the penetrating insights into so many people's lives. Bottner makes all this clear from the start. There is no attempt to mislead anyone. Yet I'm glad I read it as I did. Somehow the voices seemed more palpable to me than I suspect they might have had I known. But then either way it's beautiful, tragic writing.There was only one slightly false note from my perspective, and it comes toward the end as Bottner is trying to explain Israeli-Palestinian politics. I have long been a supporter of Israel. My grandsons are Jewish, and I studied Hebrew in college. But I think she tried at the end a little too hard to convince us not to judge Israel too harshly. It's understandable, but it risks turning a very moving story into a piece of propaganda, or a political polemic at best. Some of Israel's harshest critics these days are Israelis themselves. That is to Israel's eternal credit, unlike Germany during the war.Despite this minor, from my perspective, flaw, it remains a singular work about the Holocaust, and it's incalculable effects on people's lives. That Bottner is alive to write it is a tremendous testament to her grandparents and the many brave souls who helped them, consciously or otherwise, survive a literal reign of terror. An excellent and imaginative effort.

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