By the time WW II ended in Europe, the Blumenthal family-- Marion, her brother Albert, and their parents--had lived in a succession of refugee, transit, and prison camps for more than six years, not only surviving but staying together, a phenomenon that Marion attributes to the power of her four lucky stones. After trying on several occasions to leave Europe, and after being shunted from camp to camp, they arrived in Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were so bad that nearly half the camp's population died of disease, starvation, exposure, exhaustion, and brutal beatings. Two weeks before the advancing Russian army reaches the camp, the Blumenthals suffered another terrible blow; they were bundled onto a train bound for Auschwitz. Only because the train was unaccountably delayed were its passengers found by the Russians and freed. This gripping memoir is written in spare, powerful prose that vividly depicts the endless degradation and humiliation suffered by the Holocaust's innocent victims, as well as the unending horror of life in the camps. It's also an ennobling account of the triumph of the human spirit, as seen through a child's eyes.

About the Author

In Her Own Words... I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had a very ordinary and uneventful (as it seemed to me) childhood. I read voraciously, but it never occurred to me that I would one day become a writer. For one thing, I had never met a real, live author, as young people do nowadays in their schools and libraries. And, in any case, most of the writers I read in my growing-up years, like Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, were dead. I didn't begin to publish juvenile fiction and nonfiction until my own children were in the fourth or fifth grades at school. I was stimulated by their expanding interests and by the realization that I had a great need to explore the longsilent world of my own childhood. Soon I was writing contemporary novels for middle-graders, among them the Fat Glenda series. I also became intrigued with the reaches and challenges of nonfiction. I ventured into the American culinary past with titles like Slumps, Grunts, and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why (Clarion). And I traveled to distant Egypt to do on-site research for Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure (Clarion). When I met Marion Blumenthal Lazan and heard her speak about her experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I knew that here was a story that had to be put into book form. As part of the Blumenthal family's six-and-a-half years under the Nazi yoke, Marion, her parents, and her brother spent fourteen months in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. This was the very camp in which Anne Frank had died ... and at the same time that Marion and her family were there. Anne Frank left us no writings of her life in the camps. But Marion was able to convey to us the details of daily life, and of death, in that place of most indescribable horror. When Marion told me about the four perfect pebbles that she sought to gather each day on the barren grounds of the camp, I felt that that would be the perfect title for the book. For the lonely and frightened nine-year-old, the sets of matching pebbles offered some kind of assurance that Mama, Papa, her brother, Albert, and she would survive Bergen-Belsen, if not the war-long effects of the Holocaust itself. It's a source of great pride to me that Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story, which agreed to co-author at great emotional expense, is my fiftieth published book.

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