Bernice Eisenstein

A short book, an interesting book. This is written by the child of two people who met, then married after the last days of Auschwitz. These parents never spoke about their time there, until finally Eistenstein's mother recorded some camp memories for a Canadian broadcasting company. Eisenstein relied on other family members, on unguarded fragments, on tangible small souvenirs (her father's wedding ring, rescued from the effects of a deceased prisoner in Auschwitz by her mother) to build up an understanding of what her parents had been through before landing in Canada to begin a new life. These survivors put all their efforts into being normal Canadian citizens, normal Jews. The strain on them, and by extension Eisenstein, was sometimes almost unbearable, and her sense of alienation is palpable. I'm not sure what, if anything, her pictures added to this record.… (meer)

This is a biography about the child of two Auschwitz survivors.

While she rarely heard all that much about what her parents went through for obvious reasons, she was really curious about the Holocaust and what it did to her parents, especially her father and tried to put together what she could. This isn't so much a story about the war itself, but mostly about the life afterwards with bits of war sprinkled in... for example the story of her father's wedding ring was a tie-back to when her mother was a prisoner before her parents met.

I do think this book is a little confused at times, the cartoony illustrations were at times quite funny, which lessens the gravity of the subject matter although that could simply be the Jewish tendency to use humour.… (meer)

I picked this up second hand as liked the illustrations, and that it was genre-bending, being neither a graphic novel nor a memoir with illustrations. And I am glad I did now.

Bernice tells her parents' stories, and her own. Hers involves tiptoeing about her parents', particularly her father's, hard to read emotional states. Theirs involve being prisoners at Auschwitz up until liberation- hence the emotional scarring. It is not as self-indulgent as it sounds, with the author really wanting to explore parents painful stories, but, so as to spare them the remembering, without asking them. It is a nice portrait of post-war lives, and how the horrors committed upon people take generations to heal.… (meer)