| "Trapped
Inside the Story"
A Heart-wrenching
Tale of a Young Holocaust Survivor
The year:
1941. The city: Lvov, Poland. The fear level: palpable. To be Jewish
in this time and place is to be the prey; the hunted. Entire families
disappeared overnight never to be seen again. Hitler’s regime
hijacked and took possession of homes and businesses, leaving others
penniless. Nazi soldiers roamed the streets, mercilessly rounding
up innocent civilians. This was the harsh reality Jewish families
faced in Poland during the Holocaust. This was no place for a child
to fend for herself and avoid certain death.
“Today, decades later it is unthinkable that the horror and
cruelty that Jews suffered during the Holocaust are denounced as
fiction by some politicians,” says author and Cultural Anthropologist
Leslie Cohen. “In recent weeks the presidents of Iran and
Venezuela have both claimed the Holocaust never happened. That is
why Holocaust survivors feel it is so important to share their stories;
to raise their voices and drown out those ridiculous and insulting
allegations.”
While museums and historians have carefully documented the Holocaust
atrocities, one of the most harrowing descriptions of the Nazi occupation
comes from the voice of a child, Sonya Hebenstreit. Sonya lost her
entire family in a six-month period and was forced to rely on her
wits and instincts to stay alive during one of the darkest eras
of human history. Cohen chronicles Sonya’s struggle to survive
in her new book, Trapped Inside the Story.
Sonya had just turned 13 years old when she found herself all alone
and plunged into a bleak and terrifying new existence. A heart-wrenching
yet inspiring tale, Cohen begins with Sonya’s early memories
of happier times with her family. She is a typical little girl,
going to school and reading fairy tales. Slowly, her sense of safety
and security is chipped away as a blanket of anxiety falls on her
neighborhood. Sonya witnesses hushed and worried conversations between
her parents, the devastation of air raids, and finally, the unthinkable;
all her family members die or simply disappear.
Cohen vividly recreates the pervasive duress that permeated every
facet of life for Sonya as she roamed the streets, trying to sell
clothing or cigarettes—anything to scrape together some money
to buy food—all the while trying to avoid the clutches of
the Nazi soldiers who would randomly round up the Jews and haul
them away. With the constant fear of capture or retribution looming
over the neighborhood, Sonya quickly discovered that the only person
she could trust was herself.
In those desperate hours, she found comfort in the fairytales from
her early childhood. Sonya began relying on imaginary conversations
with story’s heroes to help make decisions that were literally,
a matter of life or death. “Here you have a child thrust into
a situation where each decision she makes could truly be her last,”
says Cohen. “She didn’t have the luxury of seeking advice
and instead, Sonya would think about what the fairy tale hero would
do and so that became her point of reference and her coping strategy.
She felt like she was trapped inside a brutal and tragic fairy tale
that had somehow come to life around her.”
Trapped Inside the Story not only recounts Sonya’s desperate
fight to survive, it also captures the voices of the missing and
the dead. In the book, Cohen helps answer some of the nagging questions
about the Holocaust. “People always want to know why the Jews
didn’t just leave,” says Cohen. “But when the
first rustlings of rumors about Hitler’s death camps made
it to the streets, the descriptions were so vicious and so horrific,
people simply couldn’t believe it was true. They thought those
who talked of the concentration camps weren’t ‘right
in the head.’ Of course now, we know otherwise.”
Trapped
Inside the Story
By Leslie Cohen
326 pp., paperback $24.95 US
Level 4 Press, 2007
ISBN 9781933769165
Available at www.level4press.com
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About
The Author:
Leslie Cohen
was born and raised in New York City. She earned her Master’s
degree in Cultural Anthropology from Hunter College and taught anthropology
at a branch of the University of Alaska for three years. In 1978,
she and her husband, Mitchell, studied Hebrew at Kibbutz Ein Hashofet.
Kibbutz authorities asked them asked to become members and they
settled there permanently in 1980. They have three children who
were all born on the kibbutz.
While teaching English in the kibbutz elementary school, Cohen met
Sonya Hebenstreit and began writing her biography. To date, Cohen
has published over 100 book reviews, dozens of articles, short stories
and poems in a wide variety of newspapers and journals. Her book
of poetry and short stories, Facets of the Poet, was published in
2001.
Source:
Event Management Services, Inc.
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