National Network for Equitable Library Service

When the Nazis invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, elementary school teacher Helena Jockel could only think about how to save "her" children. She accompanied them all the way to Auschwitz only to see them taken to the gas chamber. Her account of living and surviving in the camp and on the subsequent death march is clear-eyed and poignant, sometimes recording the too-brief moments of beauty and kindness that accompany the unremitting cruelty. She returns to Czechoslovakia after the war, and attends university so that she can teach high school. A passionate and committed teacher, she refuses to hide her Jewishness under a Communist regime that will not allow her to talk about the Holocaust. Her students, however, find ways to learn themselves about what she experienced and Helena finds ways to teach the lessons she wants to teach through literature.