Gazing at the Stars

‘These events, the persecution of my people, have simply become part of the collection of facts that people now call ‘history’. I lived these facts every day. They are part of my memory. ‘History’ tells us that the Jews of Bratislava were persecuted by the invading Nazis. What it doesn’t tell us is how it feels, as a nine-year-old girl, to have your bicycle forced from your hands, confiscated by a soldier while your father watches, powerless.’ As a young girl in Slovakia in the late 1930s, Eva Weiss enjoyed the love of her close family and the support of a warm community around her. But her innocence was shattered by Nazi Germany’s invasion of her homeland in March 1939. As the persecution of Europe’s Jews gathered momentum, Eva’s parents were forced to send their ten children into hiding, but she and her sister Marta could not avoid capture. In this remarkable memoir, Eva Slonim records her experiences at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. There, she witnessed countless horrors and was herself subjected to torture, extreme deprivation, and medical experimentation at the hands of the notorious Dr Josef Mengele. When the Soviet army liberated the survivors of Auschwitz early in 1945, Eva and Marta faced a new challenge: crossing war-torn Europe to be reunited with their family. Narrated with the heartbreaking innocence of a thirteen-year-old girl and the wisdom of a woman of eighty-three, Eva Slonim’s story is a record of survival in the face of unimaginable evil. It is the culmination of her lifelong commitment to educating the world about the Holocaust, and to keeping alive the memory of the many who perished.