Tales from a Child of the Enemy

This book belongs on the same shelf as Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" and "Schindler's List." Duba really gets inside her characters -- victims, perpetrators and those in-between. Her poems will leave lasting impressions and have readers returning to the pages many times.

This beautifully written gem should be required reading for anyone who feels they understand the Holocaust. Ursula Duba is brutally honest in her portrayal of "civilized" behavior in difficult circumstances. This book will take your conscience on a difficult trip by showing us that we are all responsible for protesting injustices in the world around us.

In reading Duba's book, my first inclination was to be suspect of this German gentile who had the audacity to portray the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, but as I read the sequence of story poems that, like blocks, built a picture of the complex, multi-layered experience of all the participants, I began to soften and ultimately came over to join her in viewing the experience from her vantage point. Duba is brutally honest with herself, requiring me too, to examine my prejudices and stererotypes. Her courage to face herself and to face up to others gave me the encouragement to examine my experience, to face down some of my haunting demons and the manadate to speak out. - Second generation Holocaust survivo

TALES FROM A CHILD OF THE ENEMY by Ursula Duba compels us to realize that the past is a state of mind. She carries us back into her childhood in post-war Germany, and then quietly returns us to the present. There, through our own time, Duba again carries us back, this time further and deeper and into the psyches of those who were witness to the inhumanity of the Third Reich. We realize that the events of another time and another place envelop and profoundly affect the way our present is seen and tolerated by certain individuals, people whom we might very easily know. We come to realize that their struggle, their understanding, and their insights can have profound influence on the world around us. That this is true, especially for those of us who presumed that our realtionship to the events of WWII and the Holocaust were non-existent or at least, very distant, is stunning. We are inescapably drawn into Duba's mind and heart by the deceptively conversational tone of her poems, by her easy description of events and issues which so quickly become as familiar to us as the events in our own lives. The lives of others and the "then" which has impacted so strongly upon them today, becomes a part of our own lives, our own now