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Rating: 
Summary: Unimaginable Reality
Review: I couldn't stop reading this book. I was crying. I wanted to shout, to yell, to kick, to k.... I couldn't avoid the thought that if I was put in this hell, probably I wouldn't survive it.Born in Israel, I've learned a lot about the Holocaust but never before I felt the horror so strong. For example, Noami's description of the Nazis humiliating her grandparents shocked me stronger than all the many times I watched pictures of the Nazis cutting a Rabbi's sidecurls (PEYOT) hair and beard. The part telling how in the US every one refused to hear Noami's story made it even more terrible and hard to comprehand. I wanted to thank you Noami for telling your story which I promise to tell to my children.
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Summary: review by a Holocaust scholar
Review: Naomi Samson's memoir is aptly titled. Not only does it provide an account of a child survivor of the Holocaust, but the author seems able to reach into the past and describe events as her child-self experienced them, sometimes even assuming a child's voice. The result is a compelling, sometimes excruciating read, from its beginning in medias res three years after the Nazis invasion of Poland in 1939 to its conclusion six years later upon the author's post-war arrival in America. Take, for example, this bit of dialogue, ten pages into the book, in which the nine-year-old Naomi is told by her Mother that she is giving up the attempt to hide from the Nazis in Poland.
"Listen to me, my child," she said. "We can't go on like this. We will either die of starvation and the animals will eat our flesh here in the woods, or someone in these villages will kill us. I have decided we should walk to our hometown, Goray, which is eight or nine miles from here, and give ourselves up at the Jewish cemetery. That way we will be buried with other Jewish people."
"No, no!" I cried. "I will not die this way or any other way! I want to live, Mama. I don't want to feel bullets fired in my head or body! Bullet are hot and they burn a person's insides and it hurts badly until the person is dead!" (10-11)
This example also brings up some concerns I have about Hide. How much can we rely on the veracity of dialogue spoken or heard by a child and then recreated (in a different language, no less) after nearly sixty years? Furthermore, because Mrs. Samson provides little explanatory commentary, the dialogue must bear the burden of providing back story and context. This artifice is effective in that it provides timely information in an unobtrusive way but it tends to further compromise the authenticity of the dialogue. (The mother would not have had to tell her child that Goray was their hometown, and she would probably not have had to explain how far away from it they had wandered.)
These issues can be brushed aside, however, if we consider Hide to be primarily a work of literature, that is, an attempt by an author to express the truth of her life experience through language. Indeed, though the book would have been more historically accurate if it could have contained an exact record of each word spoken, such an account would probably have been less meaningful to us, considering that much of the dialogue conveys the inner feelings of the child Naomi Samson, feelings that were probably never uttered.
As Naomi grows older and the book approaches its conclusion, Mrs. Samson begins expressing her feelings directly, and, once again, the results are powerful, as in the following excerpt in which she describes a train ride through Nuremberg during the time of the post-war trials:
These executioners were given a trial? Why? I felt such anger, such hate, during those moments that if given the chance, I would have smashed their skulls with my bare hands. . . . I tried to compose myself in order to look normal to my sister and my new brother-in-law, Sam. These hateful thoughts inside me bothered me a lot. My father had taught us never to hate. "Hate only hurts the one who carries it inside," he would say. My father was no longer there to guide me. But I was smart enough to realize that one of the ways the enemy could win was by instilling hate inside me so that for the rest of my life I would only dwell in hate and never enjoy my life. Oh, how I hated them for making me feel such hatred! I decided I would force myself to concentrate on pleasant things-good things to make me happy. (162)
Such sections reveal a candor and degree of self-disclosure that one might expect in a therapy session, and, as Mrs. Samspon explains in the twenty-page epilogue that follows, she did undergo years of therapy after the war. That experience may have given her the confidence to present something approaching the raw truth in her memoir rather than crafting a version intended to be more palatable to friends and family. Though it must have been both cathartic and difficult to put such words on paper, Mrs. Samson proved equal to the task, and resisted the temptation to necessarily present herself in a good light.
Ultimately, well-written Holocaust memoirs such as this one cause us to confront the extremes of human life, and attempt to make sense of them. Along with Mrs. Samson we must ask-helplessly, fruitlessly-why did so many innocent people die, and why did so many murderers get away with it? We also have to wonder how any human being could pick up and live a fulfilling life after having endured such horrors as a young child, but Mrs. Samson has shown that such an accomplishment is possible. At first glance, the inclusion of a family photo taken on the occasion of her son's wedding struck me as a Jewish mother's indulgence, but by the time I had reached the end of this slim memoir, the sight of it made me want to cheer. Indeed, the words of the Grammy-winning dinosaur Barney, sung to her by her grandchildren in the concluding scene of the book, have never seemed so touching, nor profound: "I love you. You love me. We're a happy family."
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Summary: A Real Page Turner - I Couldn't Put it Down!
Review: This is one of the best books I have ever read - period. The author is a remarkable writer, and I can't understand why this book isn't number one on the best-seller list. It should be; it is truly that good. I felt like I was there. I got the book from the library, but I'm going to buy one for each of my adult children to read. No book or movie about the holocaust has touched me as much as this one, and I want the author, Naomi Samson, to know that this Irish Catholic and his family will never forget - because of her book. We will never forget.
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Summary: Best Holocaust Book yet
Review: This was the best book about the Holocaust and its survivors and what they went through I have ever read. I could not put it down. I am taking a class on the Holocaust and needed a book for a report. Well I found the best book I could ever have found. It is full of suffering, bravery, love, and happiness. So if you want the real story of the Holocaust as it really happened this is the book. I will soon buy my own copy.
Rating:
Summary: Best Holocaust Book yet
Review: This was the best book about the Holocaust and its survivors and what they went through I have ever read. I could not put it down. I am taking a class on the Holocaust and needed a book for a report. Well I found the best book I could ever have found. It is full of suffering, bravery, love, and happiness. So if you want the real story of the Holocaust as it really happened this is the book. I will soon buy my own copy.
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