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Never Far Away: The Auschwitz Chronicles of Anna Heilman
From the memories of Anna Heilman, comes a wrenching and raw memoir of a young girl’s fight for survival in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Born into the comfort and security of an assimilated Jewish family in prewar Warsaw, Anna’s once simple life quickly turned into a life of tragic loss, infinite resilience, and enduring love. Descriptions of Anna’s Jewish-Polish life before war along with remembered stories of her sister, who was hanged by the SS for her role in the Gunpowder Plot to destroy Auschwitz crematoriums, and her struggle to go on in the face of ineffable Nazi dehumanization culminate in an unforgettable story of the triumph of the human spirit. With gripping immediacy, Never Far Away immortalizes one woman’s love for her sister and the painful search for closure to a nightmare that has haunted her for over fifty years.
184 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 5, 2016
Yet another difficult read. I have read a few diaries/memoirs about the Holocaust. I find I can only read a bit at a time and then I need to take a break. A horrifying, unimaginable living nightmare. How those that survived found the courage to hold on is remarkable. To survive all that physical and mental torture and then to learn that their suffering did not end there. Survivors then had to deal with gnawing feelings of guilt for having survived. Heart-breaking.
November 14, 2022
Excellent true life story written from diaries and memoirs of Anna Heilman between 1944 and 1994. The uprising in Auschwitz is what inspired my last read Beyond the Wire. The author used Anna’s account to research for their book. Anna diaries translated from polish, written in 1944-45 while in auschwitz and then in Belgium. The rawness of the horrible atrocities she and so many endured was so very hard to read. Yet interesting bc it was her story in her words. It is no longer being published which is very sad.
September 8, 2016
A mixed bag of a book. For a work subtitled The Auschwitz Chronicles, we don't arrive at that terrible place until halfway through it. Then much of the action and Mrs. Heilman's interpretation of it and a broad range of facts contradict the historical record, witnessed as they were by the child-prisoner she was at the time.
Never Far Away is invaluable, though, in the picture it paints of her more famous sister Esther, and the weapons factory adjacent to the camp in which both labored. No one stole more gunpowder from this plant's Pulverraum than Esther, powder that proved essential to the rebels of the iconic Birkenau inmate-revolt of Oct. 7th, 1944. Heilman's account is also important in its portrayal of others who conspired to make that revolt possible, as well as some of the SS it was directed against.
One should read the book with a certain amount of circumspection-- but read it nonetheless. It does provide much fascinating first-hand information on one of the more extraordinary, if little-known, instances of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
Never Far Away is invaluable, though, in the picture it paints of her more famous sister Esther, and the weapons factory adjacent to the camp in which both labored. No one stole more gunpowder from this plant's Pulverraum than Esther, powder that proved essential to the rebels of the iconic Birkenau inmate-revolt of Oct. 7th, 1944. Heilman's account is also important in its portrayal of others who conspired to make that revolt possible, as well as some of the SS it was directed against.
One should read the book with a certain amount of circumspection-- but read it nonetheless. It does provide much fascinating first-hand information on one of the more extraordinary, if little-known, instances of Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews