Anita Lobel: A Stunning Autobiography, by Allen Raymond

Avoiding what she felt might be interpreted as "sanctifying victimhood," her book, a finalist in the 1999 National Book Awards, is a story of hope and survival while "ducking the Nazis."

Editor's Note: Ten years ago, when Teaching K-8 published an interview with the fascinating, articulate and immensely talented artist/author Anita Lobel (November/December 1989), she was not yet ready to speak of the seven years she and her brother spent struggling to survive World War II. But now, through the encouragement of a writer's group in New York City, and the support of Susan Hirschman, her friend and inspiration at Greenwillow Books, Anita Lobel has given all of us the opportunity to share in her amazing story.

Anita Lobel (left) shares one of her books with Editorial Director, Patricia Broderick (center) and Publisher, Allen Raymond (right) of Teaching K-8 magazine.

In the Prologue to her autobiographical book, No Pretty Pictures, A Child of War (Greenwillow Books, 1998), Anita Lobel explains, "Over the years many people have asked me to write the recollections of the early years of my life. I have balked. I have resisted."

Amplifying on that reluctance, she adds,"...it is also wearisome as well as dangerous to cloak and sanctify oneself with the pride of victimhood. I have spent many, many more years living well, occupied with doing happy and interesting things, than I spent ducking the Nazis or being a refugee."

It was the appearance of her stunning autobiography which brought us once again to her New York apartment in early November, 1999. The autobiography: how did it happen? Through her writer's group, she told us, she was able to "...find a voice that was not complaining, had no self-pity. That would have been abhorrent to me."

Thus, thanks to the writer's group, we now have the gripping story of how she and her brother survived "...on the landscape of war." It's a page-turner.

"I was barely five years old when the war began," she writes. "Only when I was much older did the horrors and terrible losses of fully conscious people during all those years of terror dawn on me. I mourn for all those who were grown, thinking people and who were truly capable of knowing and feeling that which was torn from them."

She closes the book with this comment: "In the end, what is there to say? I was born far, far away, on a bloody continent at a terrible time. I lived there for a while. I live here now. My love for this country grows with my years. My life has been good. I want more. Mine is only another story."

Mine is only another story? Not quite.

It is a one-of-a-kind story of two little Jewish children in Poland — five-year-old Hanusia (her Polish name was Aneta; in Sweden, after the war, it became Anita) and her three-year old brother — both of whom survived the Holocaust with the help of family and friends, and through the wiles and love of their Catholic nanny (Niania).

Their nanny was a strong woman and a devout Catholic. While living in Krakow, before the Nazis came, she hung on the wall over Anita's bed a picture of an angel guarding two children crossing a bridge over a treacherous ravine. Niania, according to Anita, "sneered at the kosher dishes in the family household. In the kitchen she kept a special little pan that she used for cooking bits of bacon."

A necklace of medals. "Around our necks," Anita wrote, "hung the medals of the Virgin and the Christ Child, St. Anthony and other saints that Niania trusted." Anita!s relatives had tried to take away the medals, but she wouldn't let them. "Whenever I touched my medals, I felt safer. The medals made us less Jewish."

As the Nazis tightened their grip, Niania, who posed as the children's mother, had moved with them to the countryside, eventually finding haven — for a short time — in a village where Niania had lived as a child.

It was then that she decided Anita's brother should be dressed as a girl. "Only Jewish boys were circumcised," Anita wrote, and "Niania decided that from now on it would be safer for my brother to be dressed as a girl."

A train of boxcars. It was when waiting for a train to take them to Niania's village that they saw their first train of boxcars, with crowds of people climbing into them, an event they would eventually experience themselves.

There followed harrowing episodes back in the Krakow ghetto, then a surreptitious move out of the ghetto to a Benedictine convent, a sudden sweep through the convent by the Nazis, who knew the nuns were sheltering Jews, and then the concentration camps.

In the convent, Anita wrote, "My brother and I knew the mass in Latin by heart."

"That was our game. Other kids played stickball; we performed the Mass. He was dressed as a girl, but my brother was always the priest and I was the congregation."

Eventually the war ended and "...one brilliant morning soldiers who were not Nazis came and opened the gates of the camp. Leaving the barracks with my brother, I thought of all those years of running from city to country, of hiding.

No more lineups. "I thought of the lineups, the marching, the transports in trucks, the boxcar, the shouts and commands in the dreaded language. We had been scurrying vermin, and now we were walking away in broad daylight right under their Nazi noses."

Anita and her brother, diagnosed with tuberculosis, were sent by bus and plane to a sanatorium in Sweden. She fell in love with the country and its language and, with the encouragement of her teacher, discovered she was a talented artist. Through assistance from a Swedish organization, she located her parents and her beloved Niania, all of whom, miraculously, were alive and living in Krakow.

Sadly, she and her brother were never reunited with Niania, who died of a brain tumor in Krakow. However, Anita's parents came to Sweden and eventually the family of four moved to the United States. Anita was sixteen, and a new life had just begun.

Allen Raymond, publisher Teaching K-8 magazine.