Alicia: My Story

Best book on someone’s journey through the holocaust I have ever read. I was moved to tears !

An incredible memoir showing how one young lady survived the holocaust.

Though I've read numerous Holocaust-era stories, this one was truly distinctive. The incredible detail gave me a slightly greater understanding (if that is EVEN possible) of the circumstances some Jews had to endure to survive through many years as they feared for their lives daily, as well as the danger many unselfish individuals risked when they decided to become part of the plight to sustain these desperate people. Bless them! Though it was uncertain as to when the war would end, it was unfortunately evident that the rampant, deep-rooted hatred would not dissipate anytime soon. Additionally, I wrote this review before I was even half-way through the book.

I teach parts of this book to my English students because it really is a great piece of writing, and the story is so harrowing even though she never experienced a concentration or death camp. I am a self-proclaimed Holocaust expert, and while I do love memoirs of Jewish survivors of the death camps and human experimentation, this is still one of my favorite books. Alicia got away with her life within an inch of death more times than seems humanly possible, and her story of survival is an important parallel to the stories of survivors of death camps and concentration camps.

This is perhaps the best book on the holocaust EVER written!!! Alicia really has done a stunning job on this book; not a detail left out! And it is SO gripping! This story has anger and hatred towards Hitler and his followers, of course, but it is much more emotional, more intimate. This story has much more tenderness than any other Holocaust story I have EVER read; even the hardest, most callous person(I am the stoic type) would be left sobbing from this story. Alicia has a close and VERY loving family(a rarity nowadays, which is quite a pity): both parents, three older brothers and one younger one. Your heart is torn to pieces as each of the family is killed one by one. After her mother was killed and she had to flee Buczacz, she finds herself working for farmers and trying to help her fellow Jews, and even saves some Russian partisans from death. When she is congradulated by the Russian army, she wishes to return to Buczacz. But(the way I see it) she seems to have somewhat of a crush on one of the partisans she saved(Kola, I think his name is) and is hesitant on leaving. This whole book is remarkable! But Miss Jurman must have gone through the most dreadful pain having to remember all these terrible memories. But her work has not at all been in vain. Brava Alicia! I hope you are reunited with your family and friends when your time here has passed. This book is just wonderful to read. Thank You so Much!

Alicia's story is one of the most compelling memoirs of Holocaust survival I've ever read. It's a young girl's personal story, and non-political. Yet her experiences intimately document the political upheaval during the War years in Eastern Europe. Alicia was still a child in 1939, but she already knew that being a Jew in Poland meant living with anti-Semitism. So, when the Red Army took occupancy in Eastern Poland, it was not necessarily a hardship for her. The Soviets established schools, which were taught in Ukrainian and Russian. Alicia would discover in the coming years how necessary those language skills would be for her survival. The horror began with the German invasion and the murders of her father and brothers. Barely escaping with their lives, ten-year-old Alicia and her mother fled east, eking out a desperate living while avoiding the predators all around them. Their erstwhile Polish neighbors were quick to betray them to the Gestapo and its collaborators, the Ukrainian police. More dangerous and difficult to elude were the Banderovcy, marauding nationalist guerillas whose slogan went: "With the Jews we'll begin and with the Poles we'll finish!" Assuming alternating identities of an orphaned Polish or Ukrainian peasant girl, Alicia managed to get enough field work to provide food for herself and her mother. Invariably though, her deception would be revealed by so small an oversight as forgetting to Cross herself before eating, and she and her ailing mother would have to flee anew. Then her mother was captured and shot by the Nazis. Alicia, completely alone, began to care for starving orphaned Jewish children even younger than she. By coincidence, she was able to assist a band of Russian partisans escape execution and was subsequently decorated as a Soviet heroine. The documents she received from the Red Army, and the friendship of the Russian Jewish soldiers who became her protectors, would ensure her survival for the remainder of the War. With the retreat of the German forces, Alicia began her perilous new role as a guide with the Brecha, a Zionist underground railroad. Using her partisan documents, she smuggled displaced Jewish refugees through the Soviet checkpoints and onto boats headed for Palestine. Ahead would be still more hardship... Alicia now travels to schools, synagogues, and churches in the US, telling her story of Holocaust survival. I wholeheartedly recommend her remarkable memoir for teens and adults alike!

Anyone who believes the Nazis acted alone to murder Jews must read this book. It will cure them forever of believing that falsehood. All over eastern Europe, neighbors beside whom Jewish people had lived for 1,000 years willingly helped with the killing. Alicia Jurman relates in horrifying detail the murders her father and three brothers and other members of her family. Only she and her mother remained alive. Then a school friend's father sent her to an intended slow death with 60 women from Buczacz. They were taken Chortkov prison, starved for days, then given water contaminated with typhoid. All but Alicia died of the disease. She was was pulled, naked and near death, but breathing, from a pile of corpses, by the Jewish prison undertaker. Jules and Sala Gold hid her and nursed her back to health, returning her to Buczacz and her mother in an undertaker's wagon filled with stinking corpses.Alicia escaped a second massacre in Kopechince; 600 women were marched to the edge of a pit, into which Nazi soldiers shot their civilian victims. An armed ghetto friend suddenly appeared with a machine gun and began killing the soliders, screaming, "Run." Alicia escaped in the confusion. She found her mother again in Buczacz, to which they had sworn to return if they were ever separated. Alicia and her mother escaped to the countryside, where she posed as a peasant, sometimes Ukranian, sometimes Polish, sometimes Russian, and fed her hidden mother with whatever scraps of food she could earn or steal. In 1944, her mother was fatally wounded by shrapnel when the Germans shelled Buczacz.From this hell, Alicia Jurman was liberated in 1945, the only surviving member of a huge family. Besides her parents and brothers, her aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents all perished. After recovering from tuberculosis in Belgium, she sailed to Palestine with hundreds of young members of Youth Aliyah--all survivors. In Haifa, their ship was boarded by British troops desperate to keep Jews out of their promised homeland. On that ship alone, blows to the head and chest killed six young Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Alyssa A. Lappen

I too read this as a student - in 7th grade, and I am now a college student. The entire school read this book and I remember teachers crying reading it outloud. Alicia took over 300 books home and signed a paragraph in each, taking the care to tape torn edges of each of our books, and then sent them back to us. I've read it 3 times and find it gets better each time. It is an inspiring book filled with adventure, terror, joy, hope and love. I've passed it to 4 friends, each who found it incredible. Don't think about buying it - DO IT! I promise you will not be sorry.

It started out quite innocently, seeing someone else reading the book and growing interested in the cover. I always read books about World War 2 because they moved me so and I learned so much. In comparison to so much other history, it is a much more recent event. I then went to buy the book, after all it was on a book list for school. I didn't know that after I read this book my life wouldn't quite be the same.Alicia was an extremely brave girl who risked her life to help others, even when she did not realize it. For years before 1939 she lived a perfect life. She had friends, a loving family, a nice home... but then it was taken away from her. She nearly lost her life many times, but continued to survive. She worked for food in the fields of Poland, making up stories, and struggling to get just one piece of bread for her mother. Soon, she looses everyone and she has to cope with the loss and continue to live. So many times I had to put this book down because tears were streaming down my cheeks. After reading this I have decided to do something to help humanity and to be courageous in that way like Alicia was. She is my hero and probably always will be. I will read this book for years to come.