"You lose your loved ones, and still you want to live."
On 21 July 1942, the Nazis reached the small Polish town of Zolkiew. Life for fifteen-year-old Clara Kramer would never be the same. While those around her were either slaughtered or transported, three families found perilous refuge in a hand-dug cellar. Hers was one of them.
Living above and protecting them were the Becks. Mrs. Beck had been the families' maid. Mr. Beck was alcoholic and a self-professed anti-Semite, yet he risked his life to keep his charges safe. But survival under his protection proved to be anything but predictable. Whether it was his nightly drinking sessions with officers of the SS in the room just above or his torrid affair with one of the hiding women, it seemed that Clara and the others often had as much to fear from Beck as they did from the war.
Clara's mother told her to keep a diary while they lived in the bunker in order to fill her time and "so the world would know what happened to us." Over sixty years later, Clara Kramer has finally turned those diaries into a compelling and heartbreaking memoir - a story of love and memory and survival.
Clara Kramer has dedicated her life to speaking about the Holocaust. Still today, at eighty-one years old, hardly a week goes by without her speaking publicly about her experiences. Her audience has included university presidents and politicians, but Clara's passion is speaking to children. She is one of the founders of the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University, New Jersey, which trains 1,200 teachers a year. She lives in New Jersey.
Clara's diary, which she kept while in hiding, is in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. From Chapter 14: We Are Just Starting to Suffer (23 April to May 1944)
The soldiers [SS who had requisitioned a room in the Becks' house] would be sleeping right above the bunker where Lola, Gedalo, Kuba, Artek and the Steckels slept. Unlike the trainmen, whose names I hadn't discovered in the two months they'd been with us, within minutes I learned that the soldiers were Norbert, Dieter, Richard and Hans. With six Germans living above us, water, food, the pails would all be impossible. If the soldiers were here, the trainmen would be gone, and vice versa. It was like one of those theatrical farces where characters run in and out of doors, barely missing each other in a ridiculous chase, except the comedy going on above our head had lethal consequences.
As soon as Norbert's duffel landed on the floor, he fiddled with the radio until he'd found a station that played popular music and light opera. He started singing right away and suddenly reverberating through the floorboards was a clear and vibrant tenor. Most people when they sang to themselves, especially when others were around, were at least a little inhibited, even if they adored their own voices. But Norbert was singing to the audience in the balcony. He knew, it seemed, every song on the radio. My life couldn't have felt any stranger to me at that moment. I didn't know who Norbert was, what he looked like, where he came from, or whether he would turn out to be one of those Germans who'd regale the Becks with his proficiency in killing Jews.
