Struggle

In her prologue, Zyskind writes a letter to her late husband, Eliezer, explaining that at last she is writing his memoirs, from his point of view. Then begins the first-person narration of the life of Eliezer--or Luzer--a Jewish child in Poland, whose adolescence was spent in ghettos, concentration camps and slave labor camps. Horror piles upon horror; after Luzer's descent to a state of utter passivity, his subsequent choice to survive is inspiring. There are the inevitable wrenching accounts of events Luzer witnesses, and of how he loses, one by one, his entire extended family and then his mother, little sister, and finally, the father he tried to save. While other novels that have dealt with similar material achieve greatness in their depiction of the horror, Luzer's story remains essentially a memoir: one more devastating story to counteract the millions that will never be heard. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)