The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow

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About The Girl In The Green Sweater: A Life In

Product Description In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.The Girl in the Green Sweater is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, The Girl in the Green Sweater is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.   From Publishers Weekly In this puissant memoir, Holocaust survivor Chiger and co-author Paisner detail Chiger's early years, largely spent hiding from Nazi and Ukrainian persecution. Told from a precocious child's point of view, Chiger chronicles long, dark hours spent in silence with her younger brother, Pawel, in makeshift bunkers and behind false walls while their parents worked menial jobs for meager rations. Chiger's seven-year-old cypher possesses a self-awareness that springs from her inner and outer turmoil, capturing well the despair and terror of a life in hiding. After the Chigers are forced into the underground sewer system, with a collection of strangers, by the Lvov ghetto liquidation in May 1943, the family spends fourteen months in the most unsanitary conditions imaginable, sharing quarters with rats and human waste. Amid the sick and starving, young Chiger clings to hope through make believe games, trust in her parents, and the Catholic sewer worker who provides their only access to the outside world. With a powerful story and a keen voice, Chiger's Holocaust survivor's tale is a worthy and memorable addition to the canon. Photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library Journal Adult/High School—Four-year-old Chiger thought of herself as a princess in her family's grand home in Lvov, Poland, in 1939. But things quickly changed as the Germans took all their belongings, their business, and their house, and moved them into one room in the ghetto. Finally, survival meant hiding for 14 months in the dark, slimy, airless sewers under the city. Leopold Socha, a sewer inspector, brought the family and 17 other people food, supplies, and news of the outside world, saving them and, he hoped, his soul as well. Although the survivors paid him, he continued to help them long after their money had run out. To keep warm, Chiger wore a green sweater knitted lovingly for her by her grandmother. The garment is now on display in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, along with her appalling story. The author writes with a compelling style that imparts the horrors of the sewer, the cruelty of the Gestapo, and the Russian "liberation." From her grand home to the sewers of Lvov, Chiger's exceptional story of a small Jewish girl stands out among the many Holocaust survival narratives as one that will touch the hearts of teens and adults alike and bring home the horrors of this very dark period in history. Use it to personalize the study of the Holocaust in world history, social justice, or psychology class.— Ellen Bell, Amador Valley High School, Pleasanton, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist “I might have been only a child,” Chiger writes, “but what I saw, what I heard, what I experienced, has been reconsidered many times, and it is the accumulation of memories that now survive.” In 1943, the 150,0