![]() I’m not surprised it’s already been optioned for a film (by Spielberg, of course). It’s gripping to read, even as it jumps around between so many people and places. A sense of pride? Badassery? Straight fury? The book tells the true story of female resistance fighters in Poland, which is to say, Jewish teenage girls turned weapons smugglers and intelligence agents. Most Holocaust books fill me with a certain amount of sadness, but The Light of Days by Judy Batalion contains so much action and agency that something new came over me. The prose feels brutally honest, offering no set-up before catapulting the reader into the everyday horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. It’s astounding in its clarity and starkness, its focus on women and their experiences in the camps, including prostitution and pregnancy. I learned about Liana Millu’s Smoke Over Birkenau through Twitter, likely from Dorian, then wondered why I hadn’t heard of it before. Here’s a sampling of what I read, organized in a way it certainly wasn’t while reading. But when I’m not reading about it, I like the wild variety of contemporary fiction, part escape-hatch, part mood-lifter. ![]() Īs both the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor and a writer working on a memoir about my grandma, literacy, and the legacy of the Holocaust, I read a lot about the topic. ![]() ![]() My reading can be fairly evenly split into two categories: Holocaust-y and not. Käthe Kollwitz, Frontal Self-Portrait, 1922 – 23 ![]()
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