Silvie

This highly literary and often engagingly witty new addition to the culturally vital genre of the Holocaust memoir details Grohs-Martin's life from her middle-class, secular Jewish childhood in Vienna in the late 1930s to her liberation from Ravensbr ck concentration camp in 1945. In engrossing, novelistic prose, Grohs-Martin describes the shock of her first encounter with Germany's racist policies, when she lost a featured role in a German film at the age of 15; her success as a performer in Amsterdam's famed Hollandsche Schouwburg until the Nazis began deportations of Jews; her work to rescue Jewish children; and her arrest, which led first to Malin and then Auschwitz. Grohs-Martin's theatricality comes through in her brave actions and determination not to capitulate to the Nazis, and in her prose style, which is filled with vivid flourishes and incidents (e.g., she describes a female camp inmate at a desk job powdering her nose when asking questions and a decorated Christmas tree in the middle of Ravensbr ck). Grohs-Martin, who is featured on the Stephen Spielberg-produced CD-ROM Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, offers important insights into both the treatment of women in the camps (a theme now more frequently explored in Holocaust literature) as well as another confirmation of the will to human dignity and survival. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)