This is a book that should be read by all those who are interested in the Holocaust and what it did to young and old.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer
Nine-year-old Piri often visited her grandmother's farm in the Ukraine. But in 1939 war broke out along the border and Piri could not return to Beregszasz, Hungary. When, over a year later, she did return, Piri found many things changed. Her stepfather had been called back into the army and her mother ran the household. Piri's friends were distant, and eventually Piri was forbidden to attend public school. Food was available with ration coupons, but it was hard to obtain, especially for Jews after a curfew was imposed on them. Then the police took her sister Lilli away and no one could find out what happened to her. Yet, in spite of all this, life went on in Piri's household even after the Germans took over Beregszasz. Jews now had to wear the star of David pinned to their clothes, and soon they were herded into a ghetto, and could take with them only what they could carry. Throughout, Piri's family is kept together by her mother's determination and seemingly endless resourcefulness—until that final moment when they are boarded on trains destined for a "work camp" called Auschwitz.
Aranka Siegal vividly recalls her childhood in Hungary, how she and her family were able to survive for the five years from the first moment she heard Hitler's name to the day they were moved from the Beregszasz ghetto.
—from the dust jacket
Nine-year-old Piri describes the bewilderment of being a Jewish child during the 1939-1944 German occupation of her hometown (then in Hungary and now in the Ukraine) and relates the ordeal of trying to survive in the ghetto.
Receiving the 1982 Newbery Honor award, this book ends rather abruptly, leading into two sequels: Grace in the Wilderness and Memories of Babi, both award-winning books themselves.
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