Alicia: My Story
by Alicia Appleman-Jurman
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Book Reviews of Alicia: My Story
Book Review: Opened my eyes
Summary: 5 Stars
It is a detailed account of the harrowing journey that young Alicia had to go through. She witnessed deaths of everyone she knew and still had the strength to help others survive the war. She had to hide her identity and her emotions to live through each day. It is by far the best book I've ever read.Book Review: Alicia: My Story
Summary: 5 Stars
I first chose this book because it was always sitting on my brother's bookshelf. It seemed so lonely so I picked it up and started reading it. It was a thick book and I wondered to myself if i would be able to finish the whole book. One second I was reading the summary, the next, I was reading the book. To my amazement, I couldn't seem to put the book down. I kept reading and reading until my eyes got tired. I never thought that I would be so interested in the book that I wouldn't be able to put it down. The main charchter in the book is Alicia. She tells her story of going from place to place, never having a permanent home since the Nazis invaded the towns of which the Jews lived in. The book tells about her horrors and her nightmares. She was the only survivor in her family. She had tried to desperately save her family, or at least the members left in it. Slowly, but gradually, her family members were eliminated one be one. In the beginning, she started as a clueless girl whom knew very little about the war, and ended up saving hundreds of lives. So many people had wanted her to live while her chances were growing smaller and smaller. She made many promises, some which she did not end up fulfilling. Alicia was a caring, gentle girl, whom learned to love, despite all the bitterness she had gone through. She learned a great deal about life in the course of few years, which seemed like a lifetime to her. Although I can not say that I know how she feels, I feel deeply sorry all the pain she had to go through.
I liked this book because it was not a fictional book trying to relive the past, but an autobiography. It told her story in her perspective. Alicia told her feelings and did not hide it. She showed much bravery and courage. She was young when she encountered these acts of hatred, but she had a reason to live on. This book shows many courageous acts. I also liked this book because it was unlike all the other books about the holocaust. Alicia's situation was differnt from other book such as Anne Frank. Alicia never went through the concentration camp and never suffered that kind of torture, but roaming around, hiding her religion, hiding the real her, was a totally different act of cruelty.
Book Review: A book worth reading.
Summary: 5 Stars
This Holocaust book is about an 11 year old girl named Alicia Jurman. She lived in Buczacz Poland with her father, mother, and her three brothers Zachary, Moshe, Bunio, and Herzl. On 1938 the
germans came. One by one as the years pass her family members were killed. When she was 13 she was alone. she saved many jewish lives. this is a great autobiography. It has a lot of action. I didn't think I would like this book but I did. This is a must read book.
Book Review: History, hatred, and heroism
Summary: 5 Stars
Alicia's story is one of the most compelling memoirs of Holocaust survival I've ever read. It's a young girl's personal story, and non-political. Yet her experiences intimately document the political upheaval during the War years in Eastern Europe. Alicia was still a child in 1939, but she already knew that being a Jew in Poland meant living with anti-Semitism. So, when the Red Army took occupancy in Eastern Poland, it was not necessarily a hardship for her. The Soviets established schools, which were taught in Ukrainian and Russian. Alicia would discover in the coming years how necessary those language skills would be for her survival. The horror began with the German invasion and the murders of her father and brothers. Barely escaping with their lives, ten-year-old Alicia and her mother fled east, eking out a desperate living while avoiding the predators all around them. Their erstwhile Polish neighbors were quick to betray them to the Gestapo and its collaborators, the Ukrainian police. More dangerous and difficult to elude were the Banderovcy, marauding nationalist guerillas whose slogan went: "With the Jews we'll begin and with the Poles we'll finish!" Assuming alternating identities of an orphaned Polish or Ukrainian peasant girl, Alicia managed to get enough field work to provide food for herself and her mother. Invariably though, her deception would be revealed by so small an oversight as forgetting to Cross herself before eating, and she and her ailing mother would have to flee anew. Then her mother was captured and shot by the Nazis. Alicia, completely alone, began to care for starving orphaned Jewish children even younger than she. By coincidence, she was able to assist a band of Russian partisans escape execution and was subsequently decorated as a Soviet heroine. The documents she received from the Red Army, and the friendship of the Russian Jewish soldiers who became her protectors, would ensure her survival for the remainder of the War. With the retreat of the German forces, Alicia began her perilous new role as a guide with the Brecha, a Zionist underground railroad. Using her partisan documents, she smuggled displaced Jewish refugees through the Soviet checkpoints and onto boats headed for Palestine. Ahead would be still more hardship... Alicia now travels to schools, synagogues, and churches in the US, telling her story of Holocaust survival. I wholeheartedly recommend her remarkable memoir for teens and adults alike!Book Review: Not by Nazis alone
Summary: 5 Stars
Anyone who believes the Nazis acted alone to murder Jews must read this book. It will cure them forever of believing that falsehood. All over eastern Europe, neighbors beside whom Jewish people had lived for 1,000 years willingly helped with the killing. Alicia Jurman relates in horrifying detail the murders her father and three brothers and other members of her family. Only she and her mother remained alive. Then a school friend's father sent her to an intended slow death with 60 women from Buczacz.
They were taken Chortkov prison, starved for days, then given water contaminated with typhoid. All but Alicia died of the disease. She was was pulled, naked and near death, but breathing, from a pile of corpses, by the Jewish prison undertaker. Jules and Sala Gold hid her and nursed her back to health, returning her to Buczacz and her mother in an undertaker's wagon filled with stinking corpses.
Alicia escaped a second massacre in Kopechince; 600 women were marched to the edge of a pit, into which Nazi soldiers shot their civilian victims. An armed ghetto friend suddenly appeared with a machine gun and began killing the soliders, screaming, "Run." Alicia escaped in the confusion. She found her mother again in Buczacz, to which they had sworn to return if they were ever separated.
Alicia and her mother escaped to the countryside, where she posed as a peasant, sometimes Ukranian, sometimes Polish, sometimes Russian, and fed her hidden mother with whatever scraps of food she could earn or steal. In 1944, her mother was fatally wounded by shrapnel when the Germans shelled Buczacz.
From this hell, Alicia Jurman was liberated in 1945, the only surviving member of a huge family. Besides her parents and brothers, her aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents all perished.
After recovering from tuberculosis in Belgium, she sailed to Palestine with hundreds of young members of Youth Aliyah--all survivors. In Haifa, their ship was boarded by British troops desperate to keep Jews out of their promised homeland.
On that ship alone, blows to the head and chest killed six young Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Alyssa A. Lappen