by Sally Grindley
Orphaned, poor, living in Africa, and a grandmother that hates her, Lydia has the odds stacked against her as she must take on a mother's role and care for her sister and brother, trying just to survive.
This is a wonderful heart wrenching story, that is beautifully told by Sally Grindley. Things are very tough for these children as they try to come to terms with the recent death of their mother to AIDS. Lydia is forced to stay home from school and work for her horrid grandmother, whose only desire is to cause pain to her grandchildren and take over their home. The every day chores they must undertake just to survive certainly made me realise how much we take for granted living in Australia.
I will certainly be reading more of Sally's lovely books.
A Story of
Sisters in Auschwitz
by Heather Dune Macadam
Co-author of Rena's Promise
This is one of those book you don’t just
read it….it becomes a part of you!
I was very touched by the memoirs of
Rena and her story of surviving the Nazi concentration camps with her sister,
Danka.
Until I read this book I wasn’t aware
that this year, 26 March 2012, marks the 70th Anniversary of the
first transport to Auschwitz concentration camp. That first transport in 1942 was
almost entirely young women
between the ages of 16 and 22. Among those 999 young Jewish women was #1716,
Rena Kornreich, a 21yr old Polish Jew hiding in Slovakia. A few days later, her
sister Danka #2779 arrived. This began a trial of love and courage that would
last 3 years and 41 days, from the beginning of their journey in Auschwitz, to
the death march through the snow, and on to the end of the war. Her motivation to keep her and her sister alive no matter
what happened came from a promise to her parents to keep her younger sister
safe. Her visions of her mother helped her through the most difficult times.
I also wasn’t aware that women's accounts
of the Holocaust are rare, and until ‘Rena's
Promise’, there has been no other book written by a survivor from the first
transport of women, mainly because not many women survived. And for that reason
alone she is historically important. Her details of events are confirmed in
many archival documents and plans. There are many more testimonies published
from male survivors than women's accounts, yet the fact remains that the first
transport was not men but girls on the verge of womanhood. They were targeted
by the Nazis as they wanted to stop the continuity of Jewish life.
by Judith Clarke
What a lovely cover that once again made me pick this book up to read.
This story is set mostly in rural Australia and begins in 1959 but follows the life journey of Ruth and her best friend Fee and when I finished the book I felt like I had actually lived along side them.
Ruth had lost her mother in a car accident when she was a baby and she was raised by her father and her grandmother, which she had a strong connection with. The story tells the tale of the girls receiving their results from their final year of school and the direction their lives followed... Fee craving marriage and motherhood and staying in this country town and Ruth winning a scholarship to a Sydney University where her grandmother thinks will save her from being trapped in this town, with all it's quirky characters. She really wants her grand daughter to live life to the fullest and have the opportunities that she was never able to have.
