Little Bird of Auschwitz: How My Mother Escaped Death and Found Our Family

Reviewed By  Nan van Dissel       January 30, 2022

 

Author  Jacques Peretti

Distributor:      Hachette Australia
ISBN:                 9781473646469
Publisher:         Hachette Australia
Release Date:   January 2022  

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The rise of Hitler in Germany during the 1930s impacted not only on Jewish communities, but also the non-Jewish populations of many neighbouring countries; it can be claimed that none suffered more than of the people of Poland. 

Jacques Peretti’s mother spent her formative years experiencing the horrific conditions which resulted from Hitler’s and the SS’s diabolical policies and unspeakable actions. As ethnic Poles, her family’s life too was intertwined with that of their Jewish neighbours.  

Yearly the number of those, who survived and can vividly remember the terrible World War II years declines, therefor it is important to record their stories. Before his mother Alina’s dementia took hold, the author, her son, wanted to record her story, as she remembered it, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

As well as being Alina’s story of her early childhood during the war years, it is also an historical account, which highlights life of the Polish population of Warsaw during the Holocaust.  It’s also chronicles the devastation of a once beautiful, cultured city which was reduced to rubble as the bombs fell, while its population was decimated; murdered or transported to a destination which would result in death.

Little Bird of Auschwitz records Alina’s father’s involvement with the underground Polish resistance, her brother’s life as a child combatant, the Warsaw insurrection, and her inevitable destination, Auschwitz – a place of death. Alina in her early nineties was asked to recall these terrible memories, which she had pushed to the back of her mind for eighty years.

I highly recommend this incredibly moving but confronting book, which reminds the reader of the consequences of standing by, while others are oppressed.  As Alina relates her story without any indication of bitterness, it is also a story of hope and optimism. Readers with a Polish background will particularly appreciate this account of life during a very traumatic time in their ancestors’ homeland.