Rating: 
Summary: The significance of the little girls on the cover...
Review: I was first drawn to this book by a haunting picture of two little girls on the book cover. I was impatient to learn their significance. I had to wait. In the opening of this story, the author relates his fear of the Not-sees (Nazi) as told to him throughout his youth by his mother who escaped Europe.
However, in an effort to come to grips with being Jewish and to learn the truth about what his family endured during World War II, an American divorced father and his two sons begin a quest to retrace the steps of an uncle who endured the Holocaust. Using a tattered journal's clues they searched for his hiding places and learned more than they expected about the war and its victims. Only after finding where and how the twins died did the author understand his great-uncles, other family members, and his mother. During the trip he also realizes what it means to be a father. I could not appreciate the cover of this book until I learned the fate of the Jewish twin sisters and others who suffered.
Rating: 
Summary: A warm and compelling narrative that brings memory to life
Review: This book touches the reader on many levels, and you may be drawn in to the writer's childhood experience as an outsider striving to find ways to fit in, while marveling at his opportunity to retrace an ancestor's flight from terror, and transfixed by the relationships that are recalled (and are still forming) in this book. For many of us, the holocaust is more fully appreciated in personal terms than in the abstract. This book doesn't just fetch the truth from the past, it carries memory forward. For a generation twice removed, and more fully assimiliated, Hiding Places is both an intriguing real life story and an inspiring lesson in how the past still echoes.
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