Wilma Pedroza Pedroza itibaren 516 95 Slätthult, Шведска itibaren 516 95 Slätthult, Шведска

A'm so ashamed that I've lost this lovely book.

This is an inspiring story about a woman who survived the Holocaust thanks to the courage of non-jews who were willing to hide her during Nazis occupation of Poland. Her happy life with her parents, grandparents and extended family was catapulted into strife when the Germans invaded Poland. Neighbors who had been friendly, were now throwing rocks at her father because he was Jewish. The school she once attended and loved, now forbid her to learn and be with the other children. At the age of 4, Lola saw her mother shot right in front of her, her father was taken away on a train and then in the middle of the night, she was handed over to a stranger by her grandmother. This is a tale of courage and perseverance.

I enjoyed Melanie Benjamin's first historical novel, Alice I Have Been because she thought through potential scenarios in the Alice Liddell/Charles Dodgson friendship, rather than just recycling rumor and innuendo as in Katie Roiphie's Still She Haunts Me. But while I've done a great deal of research into Lewis Carroll and his creations, I knew very little about Lavinia Warren. A performer with P.T. Barnum's operations, in the mid-late 19th century, she was several inches short of three feet tall as an adult, and married another Barnum performer in a lavish public wedding, which actually got so much attention it distracted the newspapers from the Civil War for nearly a week. Benjamin recreates Vinnie's world in loving detail, and gives her a presence that is notable. She is smart, practical, and very realistic about who she is and what life has to offer her, and she finds her intellectual equal not in her husband Charles, but in Barnum himself. Vinnie's younger sister Minnie is almost too saintly to be true; her initial timidity and her later unrealistic determination struck me as less true than the picture of Minnie, but she is also being seen through her loving sister's filter. Worth reading for memorable, determined Vinnie herself.