Felt I needed something a bit more serious after Bond! So, I chose a book I'd downloaded onto my Kindle for free which is a memoir of a Ukranian woman who doesn't reveal her wartime experiences to anyone until nearly 50 years after the events! Called The Secret Holocaust Diaries by Nonna Bannister (with contributions from Denise George and Carolyn Tomlin), we hear about a girl who has a great childhood within a well to do family (with a Cossack heritage), whose lives are tainted first by the Russian Revolution, closely followed by World War II. It is written in a naive style, taken from a set of diaries she started aged 9 and which she hid by sewing into her pillow or clothing. We follow her through a happy childhood Christmas into the shortages, then random violence that a war brings. She ends up in a labour camp with her mother, but they too become separated. Eventually, Nonna follows her fathers dream and arrives in America where she meets and marries a good man. She leads a happy life, but is very secretive, only showing her husband her diaries as she nears the end of her life. I found this a very enlightening perspective on the holocaust, it is too easy to forget that these unimaginable horrors happened to millions of diverse people. It made me shudder, but I think we all need to be reminded of this human capacity for evil, so that we don't allow ourselves to go down that road again.
I would give this a 3 STAR rating.
The stats bit:
Length: 336 print pages.
Price I paid: £0.00 (but as at today, it's £8.27).
Other formats available in: Print; unabridged audio CD; unabridged audio download.
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