Let Me Tell You a Story

June 17, 2013
In a burnished memoir, Calverley, a retired English teacher in Oxford, England, recreates her wartime years in Poland in the voice of a young, well-to-do Jewish child who is separated from her mother and shunted off to various safe houses. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, Calverley had grown up in Przemysl, the only child of a doctor who enlisted with the Polish army and a mother who taught literature at the university. After the Nazi invasion of 1939, the family was relocated to the ghetto and forced to wear yellow stars, and the mother was dismissed from her teaching job, leaving the child uncomprehending and profoundly shaken. Her mother and grandmother were taken away in September 1943, and Calverley, then nearly six, was abandoned to a series of caretakers—from her former wet nurse Marynia, who got her out of the ghetto under her skirts, to various relatives and Polish partisans, who are portrayed with particular brutishness. A stint in a nasty orphanage with a horrid older bully named Jorik capped Calverley’s episodic wartime saga. She makes it through these difficult years by losing herself in books—favorites include works by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens—until finally being rescued by her doting aunt and uncle back in Przemysl. Calverley’s memoir is no fairy tale—she brings the horrors of war vividly to life—but her survival is miraculous.

October 15, 2013
Crediting her love of both oral and written stories with her ability to retreat from the terrors of everyday life, Calverley recounts her own story as a young Jewish child in Holocaust-era Poland in this emotive memoir. Digging deep into the hidden crevices of her memory, she recalls her early years with her beloved mother and grandmother, their removal to the ghetto, her own miraculous escape from the ghetto, the series of hiding places she endured, and her post-war reunion with her father in England. Learning to live with the constant threat of discovery and death, Calverley luckily was provided with a natural disguise in her blonde hair and blue eyes, while her quick imagination and appreciation of literature provided her with spiritual solace. In addition to relating her own harrowing experiences, she also breathes life into the overarching horrors of this juncture in history. As the number of living survivors dwindles, each new firsthand account represents an important contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)