Bob Bechtel

This is one of the most enlightening books I've read about the experience of being Jewish in Central and Eastern Europe and trying to get away from Hitler's obsessional project of killing every living Jew. Because we meet these people through their own words, as they communicate with each other by letter--and the author had over 100 letters--one becomes deeply, emotionally involved with both their impossible plight, and their deep love for each other. The bureaucratic nightmare of just gathering the documents necessary to cross multiple borders, in time to catch ships that sometimes came and went at the whims of the Hitler himself, is an aspect of the Holocaust I had never considered. One learns that these are decent people who did everything they were asked to, yet were sometimes still unable to escape Hitler's diabolical trap. By the end of the book, one feels like one knows these people, and their deaths cause the heart to ache long after their stories end.