"This was a golden age as area bishops protected the Jews resulting in increased trade and prosperity." The Jewish communities of the cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms became the center of Jewish life during medieval times.
Accusations of well poisoning during the Black Death (1346–53) led to mass slaughter of German Jews and they fled in large numbers to Poland. The community survived under Charlemagne, but suffered during the Crusades. (Apr.The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages ( circa 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community. An exceptional story, exceptionally well told.
Of particular interest is her relationship with her mother, who survived with her (in part because of the author's determination and bravery after an accident left her mother temporarily paralyzed). Her descriptions of Auschwitz and labor camps are brutal, frank and terrifying, all the more so because she keeps her observations personal and immediate, avoiding the sweeping rhetoric that has, understandably, become a staple of much Holocaust testimony. She relates, for example, how the yellow star made her feel marked and humiliated, reluctant to attend her school's graduation how existence in the ghetto, paradoxically, made her happy to be Jewish for the first time in her life how an aunt terrified the family by destroying their most valuable belongings before deportation, so that the Germans could not profit by them. She brings an artist's recall to childhood experiences, conveying them so as to stir fresh empathy in the target audience, even those well-versed in Holocaust literature. While the facts alone command attention, Bitton-Jackson's supple and measured writing would compel the reader even if applied to a less momentous subject. After a yearful of innumerable harrowing experiences, she was liberated.
Born in a small farming town in Hungary, Bitton-Jackson was 13 when Nazis forced her and her family into a Jewish ghetto and then sent them to Auschwitz.
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