Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz

Based on a true story by Ruth and Jack Gruener, this easy to read book is about the intolerable life of a Jewish boy during W.W. II.  Young people today think they are forced into bad lives by adversity, but compared to what this young boy went through when the Nazis forced their policy of annihilation onto victims during the Holocaust, today’s youngster have it easy.  People now are traumatized by witnessing murder.  This boy saw thousands of murders.  Now hunger can be a problem, then it was years of starvation causing deaths at every turn.  This fast paced book tells of young Yanek forced into labor and an existence in 10 concentration camps.  TEN.  Can be read in one day!  I did.  Lots of time on the road!  8.5/10.

Miss Jane by Brad Watson

 
















 Very unusual story of a handicapped girl growing up in rural Mississippi through the depression era.  Her poor little body is deformed in her “bottom”  area so badly that she can not be in public without embarrassing accidents, ever, in her whole life.  Living mostly isolated, in a dysfunctional family, she tried school once but wouldn’t continue.  She worked hard on the family farm, enjoying the woods and fields but she has to be very careful whenever needing to be in public, even to the point of not eating or drinking the day or two before she would be in her village.  Romance that we take for granted, she can not.  The story goes from her birth until she was an older woman. Rather a sad story, but she did the best she could.  I would like to think that if she had been born a century later surgery could have helped her.  8 out of 10.

To See You Again, by Betty Schimmel

Another great story of the mayhem the Nazis caused in the lives of so many innocents in W.W. II. This story is true.  A great love story.  Two young people who lost everything, survived everything, but got sidetracked in the process.  I’m not sure I’d have made the same eventual choice the author did.  It’s haunting every step of the way.  Of course families couldn’t believe, or even imagine, what the work camps really were.  Nor could they fathom that they would be taken from their county farms, town and villages, and large cities and lose their fortunes and each other.  The clamp down on their freedoms were gradual and they hoped the Nazi’s would be stopped as the war swept on. Even the eventual freedom of living many years in the United States, marrying and raising a family couldn’t end the love the two had for each other, but…as I said, I’m not sure I’d have made the same eventual choice.  An 8.5 out of 10.