Born Survivors: Three Young Mothers and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage, Defiance, and Hope by Wendy Holden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A friend who visited Auschwitz recently told me tourists were buzzing about this book. Sadly, it’s a story that never gets old. Man’s inhumanity to man makes headlines daily. Holocaust can never happen again, we tell ourselves, but it can and it is.

This is a work of history, well researched and well told. Wendy Holden has organized her account of three women’s experiences in a way that kept me turning the pages to see what would happen next. She has a gift for keeping the suspense high. Even though we know the women survived the war, we wonder—did their babies live and thrive? Did they reunite with their husbands? How did they manage to survive and live any kind of a life after such extreme suffering?

While Holden reports why the women thought they managed to survive, there is still room for readers to ponder. In addition to pregnancies, did the fact that they had in common privileged upbringings, good educations, and robust health contribute to their will to live?

Distracting repetition

As the story progressed, a lot of repetition distracted me. The women were in a constant state of hunger and fright, but this was repeated so many times I found myself starting to skim through to the next event.

In fiction, a heightened state of terror can be expressed many ways. History is the telling of facts so I suppose the author is limited in expression, but the effect is that we get used to hearing it. It is chilling to think that likewise, there were townspeople who got so used to seeing the wretchedness of the prisoners who were trooped through their streets, they stopped “seeing” them.

These days, we are led to believe that any kind of trauma will likely cripple a person for life. The jaw-dropping miracle is that some survived the worst, recovered their health, and went on to lead long, productive lives.

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