Eva HeymanBesprekingen

Alexandra Zapruder, editor of Salvaged Pages, a collection of children's Holocaust diaries, believes this diary isn't genuine and was in fact mostly or entirely authored by Eva's mother, Agnes Zoldt, who committed suicide after the war. I respect Ms. Zapruder's scholarship and thus read this diary with a jaundiced eye, but I can't find anything that leads me to believe it was written by anyone other than Eva. The voice sounds like an intelligent thirteen-year-old girl to me. Zapruder cites inconsistencies in the style and content as the reason for her belief that the diary is fabricated, but these inconsistencies can be explained by the fact that she was reading a translation of a translation of the book. (From Hungarian to Hebrew to English. The original diary was lost shortly after its publication.)

Though the diary only covers a few months, the entries are very detailed, and you can see Eva's life -- and the lives of all the Jews in Hungary -- crumble all to pieces. Recommended.

Fact of note: Eva's stepfather was Bela Zsolt, a well-known Hungarian writer and politician, who wrote his own Holocaust memoir, Nine Suitcases.