The Lost Childhood: A Memoir

Dispossessed early in WW II by the Russians, Nir's affluent Polish family endured the German occupation and persecution as Jews by pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Ukrainians. After the father's murder, the 11-year-old author, his mother and 16-year-old sister escaped deportation to extermination camps by developing skills of rapid improvisation, and using forged identities and disguises. A tale of hair-raising adventure and countless hardships, this is also a candid, moving and sometimes funny account of a sensitive boy's crisis-dominated adolescence, which, while fraught with normal longings, included his serving as a courier in the fetid sewer system during the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising. Russian liberators who freed the family from slave labor on a German estate, then accused them of collaboration with the Nazis, forcing the three to flee once again--this time back to Poland. (Oct.)