I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz

In a powerful telling, the late Eva Mozes Kor (1934–2019) and Davidson provide as much history lesson as personal recollection and call for human rights. The book opens in 1941, as seven-year-old Eva and her identical twin Miriam (d. 1993), members of the only Jewish family in a Romanian village, encounter anti-Jewish ideas in media as well as experience cruelty from previously friendly classmates. Eva’s nature as a leader willing to speak her mind is quickly established as she presses her resigned parents: “It’s not safe to stay here.” Following the family’s deportation to Auschwitz, where she and Miriam become part of Josef Mengele’s experimentations on identical twins, the girls’ horrific experiences—intense reading for the target audience—are interspersed with contextualizing background on topics such as anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and propaganda, genocide, and WWII. Eva’s “unending desire for survival,” her vow to protect Miriam, and “luck” bring the sisters through the war and to Israel in 1950; final chapters trace Eva’s subsequent years as a human rights activist and Holocaust educator in Indiana. Unflinching in its first-person telling, the narrative is carried by its narrator’s passionate conviction, per an afterword, that “memories will provide the necessary fuel to light the way to hope.” Back matter includes a timeline and glossary. Ages 8–12. (Apr.)■