Wartime Vignettes: A Boyhood Memoir of World War II and of Its Aftermath at first glance seems a story, like so many others, of a young boy and his family caught up in the Holocaust during World War II.
75 years later, T.A. Dolotta embarks on a trip down memory lane as he recalls those years of hiding in the Polish ghettos, narrow escapes from concentration camp death, and how the family made it to the end of the war and picked up the pieces of their world.
Unlike many similar accounts, this did not involve a flight to America during the war; but a process of survival in Europe to the war’s end and beyond. The family wound up in France, where Ted resumed his studies, and they lived there for years before they came to the U.S. to built new lives for themselves in America.
Unlike others which focus on escape to freedom, this memoir’s survey of determinations to survive reveals logic in the actions and processes of living in Poland during the war and offers insights too rarely touched upon elsewhere: “After a year or so, history repeated itself: more sweeps in the ghetto, more railroad coal gondolas with their soon-to-be-gassed human cargo, and my father still believing that safety lay in numbers. This time, we decided to go for broke: back to Warsaw and its ghetto.”
Even when Warsaw is almost completely destroyed by the war, his parents want to return and resume their lives – and this, too, represents a departure from most Holocaust memoirs, adding an extra dimension of insight to the portrait of lives transformed by war’s impact.
The result is a powerful survey that moves beyond personal family choices to consider how many survivors forged new lives for themselves during and after World War II, remaining in Europe.
No military or Holocaust collection should be without Wartime Vignettes.
Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
