The Bottom Line
I highly recommend Tell Me Another Morning, an autobiographical account of Zdena Berger's years in Nazi concentration camps. Readers accompany Berger as she leaves her home in Prague at age 16, survives Terezin, Hamburg Labor Camp, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen due to strong friendships with other teenage girls, and then makes her solitary return to Prague at age 20. Through Berger's moving descriptions of her experiences, the reader feels a slave laborer's terror, hunger, desperation, loss and - despite it all - sustaining morsel of hope. This book is a must-read by anyone who wants to truly understand the Holocaust.
Pros
- Unique in its coverage of a young woman's experiences in Nazi concentration camps.
- Doesn't contain anything so graphic as to make it inappropriate for young adult readers.
- Enables readers to feel the horrors of being enslaved, alone, terrorized, hungry, near death....
- Reveals the importance of friendships between inmates as a key to survival.
- Covers the difficult post-Holocaust experience for the survivor trying to reenter society.
Cons
- At times you need to reread a section to understand what happened due to the poetic style.
Description
- The reader emotionally accompanies Berger as she loses her home, childhood, loved ones, and almost her life.
- The reader vicariously experiences with Berger the back-breaking labor, starvation, and terror in the Nazi camps.
- The reader joins Berger as she forms the unyielding friendships that save her life.
- The reader empathizes with Berger as "the greens" try to strip away her personal identity and reduce her to a number.
- This is a powerful, sensitive, educational and unforgetable book about a Jewish woman's experience in the Holocaust.
Guide Review - Tell Me Another Morning by Zdena Berger
The book begins with Tania, a 14-year-old girl living in Prague, slowly becoming aware of the world changing around her as the war moves closer. She watches "the greens" march through the city. She must wear yellow stars on the clothes. Then, at age 16, she must leave her home and board a train. But she still has no inkling of what horrors lay ahead.Imprisoned in places such as Terezin, Hamburg Labor Camp, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, she brings the reader along with her via poetic descriptions of her experiences and observations of others.
What would it feel to leave your home and walk through your city on your way to a transport, while your neighbors were snug in their beds? What would it feel like to be locked in a dark train, without food and water, not knowing what awaits when the doors open? What would it feel like to say goodbye to your parents, knowing they are headed for the Gas Chambers and Crematoria? What does it feel like to be forced into a shower, not knowing if poison gas or water will come out of the faucets? What would it feel like to be enslaved, terrorized and starved, day after day after day, for four years? What would it did it feel like to go home after the war, knock on the door of your home, and find a stranger living there?
Unlike other Holocaust literature, this book focuses on a teenage girl coming of age in the camps and of her saving friendships with other young women. The book’s sensitivity comes from Berger’s observations of both the good and evil she sees, and from her constant hope that good will prevail in the end. The book’s power derives from Berger’s ability to convey to readers her feelings about the experiences she underwent, thereby giving the reader a truer understanding of the Holocaust.
Tell Me Another Morning is simply a must-read.
