Edith's Book - Softcover

Velmans, Edith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140276890 ISBN 13: 9780140276893

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for Non-fiction

Edith's Book (published as Edith's Story in the US) is often compared to Anne Frank's diary. In occupied Holland, Edith, from a lively, loving Jewish family in The Hague, went into hiding the same month as Anne Frank, both Edith and Anne kept diaries, which are remarkably similar in their pre-war teen preoccupations with boys, school and parties. But Edith's world gradually darkens. When Nazi laws forbid her from attending school, riding her bike or even going to the beach, she wears the yellow star as a badge of honour, prompting people in the street to tell her to keep her chin up.

In 1943, she is forced into hiding with forged papers, posing as a family friend in a courageous gentile household in the south of Holland, where a Nazi officer is billeted in the room next to hers. Under constant danger of discovery and betrayal, she receives terrible news from home in dribs and drabs-the deportation to the death camps first of her brother, then her mother and grandmother, never to be heard from again, while her father dies broken-hearted in a far-off hospital. Edith can only dare shout her real name to the wind, and wait for liberation.

Unlike Anne Frank, Edith survived to tell her tale, and her moving teenage diary is enhanced by heartbreaking letters from her parents. A poignant coda is that after the war she became friends in the maternity ward with Miep Gies, who had helped to hide the Franks.

About this title

Review:

It's strange how much you can bear, if your doom is parcelled out to you in small doses. It's just like poison: if you start taking it very gradually, increasing the quantity drop by drop, then your body will eventually get used to it. So wrote Edith van Hessen's father during the years that were to change his middle-class Dutch family irrevocably. For the van Hessens were Jewish, and to be Jewish in Holland in 1940 was becoming increasingly dangerous. Teenager Edith, preoccupied with school, boys, and parties, tried at first to brush off the threat that the German invasion of her country held for her and thousands like her, even when, under new jurisdictions, normal life became increasingly difficult for the Jewish community to sustain. Eventually, in the summer of 1942, she parted from her family and went into hiding in the south of Holland, where she lived, under an assumed identity, with a Christian family until after the Second World War.

The rest of her family were not so lucky. Edith's Book, a worthy companion to Anne Frank's world-famous Diary of a Young Girl, traces her family history during the horrendous years of war and separation through recollection, cherished letters from her brothers and parents, and her own diary--kept in secret, recovered when the war was over and now published for the first time.

An unflinchingly honest, heartbreaking memoir, Edith's Book is not simply a testament to individual bravery and the will to survive, but a harrowing reminder that we must never forget the horrors of the Holocaust and the lessons that history should teach us. -- Catherine Taylor

Review:

Truly moving...leaving one with great hope in humanity. (Julia Neuberger The Times)

Both memoir and meditation, it is moving and wise... neither sanguine nor sentimental about the Holocaust and man's capacity for evil. It shows that a belief in goodness... is the key to living well with such a past. The most vivid evocation of the experience of Nazi Occupation I have ever read. (Linda Holt The Independent)

It's impossible to get through this inspiring and great-hearted volume dry-eyed, or without admiration for people who so bravely persevere through unimaginable hardship and privation. (The Washington Post)

Gives all the pain and pleasure of reading Anne Frank for the first time. (Esther Freud)

It holds you with the same intensity as The Diary of Anne Frank and leaves you heart-broken, illuminated, and amazed at the capacity for courage. (The Guardian)

One of the best and most moving memoirs I have ever read. (Ruth Rendell Sunday Times)

Edith's Story, the memoir of an Anne Frank who lived, reminds us of the old horror all the more effectively bu not being a horror story. Evil and grief, without being scanted, are outshone by sweetness, freshness, and pluck. (Roy Blount Jr.)

A significant Holocaust memoir... A valuable opportunity to see the situation just outside Anne's attic. (Kirkus Reviews)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140276890
• ISBN 13: 9780140276893
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256