The Lost Childhood

"The Lost Childhood" is a Memoir written by Holocaust survivor, Yehuda Nir. [Yehuda Nir, "The Lost Childhood " (New York: Scholastic, 2002).] Born in 1930, Nir was only eleven years old when his father was killed by German soldiers in a mass execution of Jewish men from his hometown, Lwow. The story is based on the cunning survival of Nir, his mother and his older sister, Lala during six years of his life throughout World War II. With the aid of false documents, a families’ will to survive, and despite his loss of innocence, his family managed to escape the cruel death of concentration camps and execution. He and his family “hid” in the open, pretending to be people they were not (Poles), practicing a faith that they did not believe in (Catholicism), and working tirelessjobs (for German employers in occupied Warsaw), struggling to conceal the pain they felt when their people were murdered before their eyes in fear of being identified. Amidst all the turmoil was a boy trying to make sense of his world, his body, and his place as a human being on Earth.

About the author

Yehuda Nir was born in 1930 into a well off Polish Jewish family and is still alive today (2008). In June 1945 he and his family returned to Poland. He went back to school at the age of fifteen and received his high school diploma at age twenty-one. He went to Vienna to study medicine for four years. He graduated from Jerusalem Medical School in 1957. As of 2001, he was an associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College. He also has a private practice in New York City with his second wife, Dr. Bonnie Maslin, whom he married in 1973. He has three sons and one daughter. He had his first son, Daniel Ludwig, in 1961. He had his second son, Aaron, in 1965. Both were from his first marriage to a woman named Eva. Divorced in 1969, he married a woman named Bonnie in 1973. They had a son in 1977 named David Samuel. In 1983 his first daughter, Sarah was born.

"The intention of this book is to convey to young people that if you take charge of your life rather than passively observe it like a couch potato, you might help to create a world where forgiveness is possible.” (Page 282, Epilogue)

Notes

References

Nir, Yehuda. "The Lost Childhood". New York, NY: Scholastic Press, 2002.