Our Mother's War: A Biography of a Child of the Dutch Resistance

by Mel Fiske, Christina Radich, Laurina Radich

Book Overview

Christina Radich and Daniel Fiske began dating in high school, back in 1972. This book is the unlikely result of their teen-aged romance.

Christina wanted to capture her mother's story of life in Nazi-occupied Holland. She didn't know how or where to start. Dan suggested that his father, Mel, a former newspaper reporter, could steer her to the starting line. Mel advised Christina to get a recorder and tapes, and ask questions. For the next 15 or...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595469493
• ISBN13: 9780595469499
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Our Mother's War: A Biography of a child of the Dutch Resistance

This sad story is about a young girl (14) left alone during the years of the Nazi occupation of Holland. Her mother and father, decided to fight the Nazi's and left her with an unresponsive extended family. It's really about her attempt to recover her life after the war. She is notably unsuccessful. Although her intelligence and creativity keep her alive during the war years, her emotional scars and (un)development during her formative years tortured her for the rest of her life. The book is a study of the Dutch Nazi occupation but also a study of a woman without family guidance during her adolescence. She pays the price.

The story of a little girl who joined the Dutch Resistance

What is Anne Frank had lived? I cannot help but think her story might have mirrored that of the late Lakshmi Radich of Sonoma County, CA. Her war experience is recounted in this moving story which began in Rotterdam 68 years ago with the devastating German blitzkreig. Until that day, Lakshmi, a cheerful 9 year old Dutch girl,lived a peaceful and relatively unremarkable existence. That all ended abruptly. In the early morning, German planes flying so low you could see the faces of the pilots in the cockpit unloaded their parachuting human cargo to capture the sleeping city. Initially refusing to surrender, Rotterdam took the brunt of heavy German bombing. At her worried mother's insistence, she and Lakshmi traveled by foot, braving heavy intermittent gunfire, to check on the well-being of the girl's grandmother, who lived a two-hour walk away. If that journey had been the most harrowing part of her life during the war, Lakshmi would have been fortunate. With her father already a part of the Dutch mobilization, Lakshmi and her mother themselves joined the Dutch Resistance. They harbored their Jewish neighbors, friends and countless strangers. She declined to be labeled a hero. "I'm not a hero. I'm just a human being who did what had to be done when it needed to be done." What she did was remarkable. Not only did she and her non-Jewish friends wear a Star of David to confuse the Germans until they caught on, she and her mother, after being found out, left their home and continued their efforts apart from one another to avoid being captured at the same time. Radich left her childhood behind that day in May. She grew up quickly. She was forced to witness fellow citizens hanged from lampposts; their bodies left untouched as a reminder of the penalty for disobedience. She saw many deported to death camps. She was raped beginning at age 10 by men in every uniform, leaving her in an "emotional no-man's land" where "the scars of war run very deep." She was able to keep informed of the war by listening to banned radio broadcasts from the West. She never found her mother after the war, but she was reunited with her father. Her war ended on a train ride to Rotterdam with refugees returning from a death camp. She and a survivor with a shaved head shared a flea and lice infested sheepskin. They sat huddled together, legs dangling from a box car. It marked the physical but not psychological end to the war for her. Her war experiences in no way trained her for life in Sonoma. She also found out what it was like to be a survivor but not always accepted as one because she was not Jewish. In time, Lakshmi Radich, with the love, help and support of her two daughters, Christina and Laurina, along with counseling, spiritual growth through trips to India and the supportive Jewish community that recorded her story for the Holocaust Library, was able to come to terms, if not peace, with her past so much so that she regained her fai

Casualties of War

'Our Mother's War' is a child's-eye view of the random horror that was World War II. It has historical value because the authors recorded the fragmented and often traumatized memories of a Dutch resistance participant, starting from age nine and extended to her early maturity. The narrative is aided by an historical perspective supplied by one of the authors, Mel Fiske, an avuncular figure who found value in the loving researches of two sisters who had observed the continuing sorrow of their mother, decades after she survived the war. He died a few days after the Radich sisters presented him with a finished copy of the memoir. The brief and touching book testfies to their mother's irreparably broken childhood and constitutes an act of filial love.