The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Nine Months in Auschwitz

by A. Novac and Ana Novac

Book Overview

The journal of a fourteen-year-old offers testimony to the nightmare conditions at Auschwitz and the ways its victims survived. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805050183
• ISBN13: 9780805050189
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 and higher

Customer Reviews

A remarkable diary

I came upon this book in my local library and promptly checked it out. Yes, it does seem confusing but then again, when we look at the context within which this was written, the confusing aspect of the work seems natural. The author went through living hell during her period in the work and death camps, and it was a miracle that her attempts to keep a diary, however fragmented the entries may seem, was successful. This work is such a valuable documentation of a teenager's experience of the Holocaust...reading her entries, one gets an intimate glimpse of the unimaginable horror she went through, things we could not fathom or imagine, yet very real. I rank this work right up there with the Diary of Anne Frank, and other memoirs of the Holocaust period, like A Jump for Life by Ruth Cyprys.

Brilliant, truly brilliant

I found this book quite amazing. The horrors that she went through were described with amazing detail, and to me, I felt as if I were in her place. The vocabulary she uses to depict each seen seemed so carefully chosen, and extremely high level for her age. I also found it incredible that she was able to right this amazing book, just off of notes that she wrote when she was young. How terrible a position she must have been in. There is one quote that I found fascinating. "Fever! Isn't it a sign of life, proof that I'm persevering, hanging on? Thank God, because after all is said and done, wouldn't it be stupid, wouldn't it be madness, to let go of a life where there are such nights, and such creatures?" These words hit me like a brick wall. Thinking back to all the times myself, and everyone around me as well, has complained about life, I felt so ungrateful. How can anyone do this, when there are people that have had such terrible catastrophes in their life, so bad that they are grateful to get sick and have a fever, just to feel alive?

With few accounts of what happened this book is a rare gem.

I thought reading this book was an important experience