Saving the Fragments

Even though this book is pretty slim, it still packs a major wallop. Unlike many Shoah memoirists, Isabella didn't stop at what happened immediately after the liberation. This wonderful little volume details what she and her two remaining sisters went through from January to June of 1945. They managed to escape from a death march to Bergen-Belsen on the 23rd of January while most of the guards had run to the back to halt and punish an earlier escape that was already in progress, and the guards who remained in front of the column couldn't see them from their position. They also happened to be right across the way from a house with no smoke coming from the chimney, and in that blink of an eye it became one sister blindly mutely following the other. Isabella and the youngest of her remaining sisters were very nearly caught and shot, but miraculously the SS man and his dog walked away without seeing or scenting them. The oldest sister wasn't as lucky and was captured, beaten, and dragged back to the column to continue the march. But for the three who escaped, the liberation came a few days later, in form of the Red Army. For 6 weeks they stayed in the house they'd escaped into, along with 3 Polish women who also escaped into the house (and there were 30 girls and women who escaped in the same vicinity, they discovered). They were still cold and hungry, and being forced to work for the Russians (such as washing their bloody uniforms in harsh lye and herding cows), and with no stores open had to loot everything, or be ingenious with what they already had, but the thrill of freedom was so great that in the grand scheme of things it didn't really matter to the girls. We see flashes of bitterness and hatred for what was done to their family and against the people who did it to them in the first place, but overwhelmingly this is a story of their reawakening, their gradual return to normal life and the human family, a constant continual joy and delight in life, at all of the people they met on the road in front of their house, on the road from Jagadschutz to the train station in Oelsk, on the train to Odessa, and finally in the refugee center in Odessa. These people knew what had happened and then some, had already lived through too much for one to expect them to be happy or hopeful, yet there they all were, full of love, life, hope for the future, constant acts of little kindnesses to total strangers to whom they instantly felt like lifelong friends or family, were constantly upbeat about the future, optimistically asking anyone and everyone if they'd seen their missing friends and family, to tell them they were alive if they saw them, hoping that their oldest sister and only brother would find them anyday now. The joy and love in these pages are balanced by the sorrow of remembering the barely recent past and how they will forever be condemned to live in two worlds, then and now, that the memories will live as long as they do, but this is not