Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Children Survivors

Of the 1–1.5 million Jewish children living in Nazi-occupied Europe, only 6–11% survived the Holocaust, many of them in hiding. Veteran writer Rosen (Psychobabble) devotes the first half of this book to telling the stories of three girls—one Polish, one French, and one Dutch—who endured sudden name changes, loss of Jewish identity, fear of being denounced, and frequent relocation. He also relates what happened after all three resettled in the U.S. after the war. In the book’s second half, Rosen addresses hidden children’s lingering emotional wounds, their issues with religious and ethnic identity, and their attempts to find each other, which began in the late 1970s. Rosen also discusses issues the few other authors who have previously written about this population have neglected, such as sexual abuse in hiding. A fine writer with a good sense of pacing and drama, Rosen sometimes tries to cover too much too quickly and, near the book’s end, he errs in maintaining that child survivors “are like the victims of a rare, incurable, ambulatory disease with no visible symptoms.” Yet these are relatively minor flaws in an otherwise valuable contribution to the literature of one of the less-discussed aspects of the Shoah. 16-page b&w photo insert. (Sept.)