'I had expected the mountain of shoes,' he says, but what pierces his detachment is seeing in a museum, among the property taken from the camp inmates, a toy on wheels exactly like the one he had when he was four. 'My Doll in Auschwitz' tells of a visit to Poland in 1967. Two final stories look back from England and safety on some of his dead relations and take bitter comfort from the thought that they would have been dead by now anyway. In 'Green Suite' he traces his family's decline through the fortunes of an ornate drawing-room chair, once the symbol of bourgeois comfort, left to grow shabby in an attic. But the stories in which he revisits his childhood give us simple pictures of a family under threat and of his refugee years in London. Occasionally, Fried's playful logic-chopping is applied to the facts of the Holocaust: a tale about well-intentioned liberals who spend so long perfecting their plans to release Jewish prisoners that they fail in their mission and an exercise in irony, a chillingly detached linguistic analysis of the last words flung at the guards by those entering the gas-chambers: 'Our smoke will suffocate you.'įried can appear sly, as if he always had one over us. The Father died in Night and the daughter died in A Spring Morning. In Night the child that had a close relationship with the father was a boy and in A Spring Morning the child was a girl. The father and child have a relationship in both stories. Quote from Night: Which means that he didnt wake up in time to realize the importance in life. The mainly first-person narrative adds drama, shape, suspense and a cinematic, Both Night and A Spring Morning have fathers. ') or pauses to focus clearly ('I can see this all as if on film. She tells it as a series of recollections, an unreeling of memories which from time to time breaks down ('I find I cannot remember how. This, the blurb tells us, is Fink's own story. Although some of their experiences involve hard labour and hunger, most of their suffering comes from the cruelty and spite of others and from the constant fear of exposure and death. They hide their dark hair and their intelligence not only from the occupying Germans but also from their fellow countrymen, who see them as a source of money (blackmail, reward or simple theft) and who believe that Hitler is a criminal 'but at least he has freed us from the Jews'. Using forged papers and false Aryan identities, the girls work in labour camps and on farms, moving on when it becomes dangerous. IDA FINK's novel is the gripping account of how two teenage girls escape from the Jewish ghetto in a small Polish town in 1942 and spend the rest of the war on the run.
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