The Bleeding Sky

I've been reading quite a few books about the Holocaust lately.  I try to read a wide range of books, but recently Amazon's "you may also like" feature has pointed me toward other Holocaust books.  This is how I came across "The Bleeding Sky" by Louis Brandsdorfer and I'm very glad I found it.

Currently this book appears only to be available on Kindle.  It may be a self published book - it's not totally clear, at least, not to me.  In the introduction, a woman writes that both her parents were Holocaust survivors.  Her father had recently passed away, taking with him, his memories of the war.  This prompted her to encourage her mother to record her memories.  This book was the result, and I  agree, these memories should most certainly be shared. 

The main character is Mala, a young Jewish woman living in Poland.  Mala's entire family (her parents and 6 bothers and sisters and their spouses) lived in nearby towns.  Mala was married and had a young child at the start of the war.  Flash forward to the end of the war and Mala's family then consisted of one sister - everyone else was killed.  That fact alone is difficult to grasp, especially now, so many years after the war.  Combine that with the hardships Mala endured during the war and the picture is nearly unimaginable.

At the start of the war, Mala and her daughter were separated from the rest of their family.  They hid in various towns throughout Poland, sometimes staying one night in a barn, other times their stays were weeks in someone's attic.  Eventually they ended up in the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, where Mala had a "job" (forced labor) retrieving items of value from Jews as they were brought into the Ghetto.  Her young daughter lived in a children's home in the Ghetto since Mala spent the days working and couldn't look after her.  One day the Nazis took away all the children in the home.  Mala never saw her daughter again.  After the war, she discovered that a transport (cattle car) took all of the children from the home straight to a gas chamber.

When the Nazis removed all the Jews from the Ghetto, Mala was shipped to a concentration camp.  From that point onward, she was moved often, from one camp to another.  (I was surprised how many times the Nazis moved her from camp to camp.)  Her longest stretch was at Auschwitz.  Since she was young and healthy, Mala was chosen for forced labor - this is how she managed to survive.  At one camp she found two of her sisters, though both were ill and were sent to the gas chamber soon after she found them.  At each camp, she would ask other prisoners about her husband, her siblings, her parents, hoping someone would have news.  She was able to learn some detail about their fates, though the information was hardly reliable.  At one camp, someone came up to her and called her by her sister's name.  Mala and this particular sister looked alike and had, throughout their lives, been mistaken for one another.  As it turns out, that sister was her only living relative by the end of the war.

This is a sobering story of survival.  As with each WWII story that I've read, while reading it wasn't easy, I'm thankful that the story was shared.  Acts of such unspeakable cruelty should not be forgotten or ignored.  And as mentioned in the introduction, it's important that these stories not die with Holocaust survivors.