Rena's promise : a story of sisters in Auschwitz /

Imagining that, by volunteering for a work camp, she would somehow be protecting her family from the Nazis, Rena, at age 17, put on her best clothes, left her fiancé and the Polish village of Tylicz in the Carpathian Mountains and was sent off to Auschwitz. Presently, her sister Danka arrived, as did cousins, schoolmates and neighbors. As a child, she had promised her mother to look after her baby sister, and that promise obsessed her throughout her incarceration in the camp. It gave her reason to survive, so that one day she could bring Danka safely home. How they escaped starvation, beatings, the crematorium, the medical experiments of the notorious Josef Mengele and survived the end of the war is all recounted here in this spirited survivor's testament, written with freelancer Macadam. After the war, Rena married a Red Cross worker and emigrated to the U.S., following her sister. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Gelissen, who was on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz, describes in this account the constant struggle for survival in the camp. She soon learns there were no guarantees. Rena's motivation came strongly from a promise to her parents to keep her younger sister, Danka, safe. Her account describes the relentless specter of death while at the same time showing how prisoners would risk their lives to smuggle medicine, clothes, and food to other prisoners. Because Rena was an early prisoner in Auschwitz, she describes some of the confusion at the beginning and the realization of what was really happening to the Jewish people. Helpful features of the book include historical notes and a section describing the fate of the people the sisters knew. This memoir captures the horror of Auschwitz in a clear way that helps the reader understand the atrocities perpetrated there. Recommended for Holocaust collections.-Mary Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The amazing story of one of Auschwitz's longest survivors. There's no such thing as a typical Holocaust story; the ``Final Solution'' was so atypical as to effectively nullify the concept. Still, Gelissen's story is particularly unusual in that she was on the first transport to Auschwitz in 1942 and survived until the camp's liberation in 1945. The number on her arm, 1716, was so low that guards were disbelieving, thinking nobody could have lived that long. But Gelissen survived: a woman in her early 20s who was neither mistress to a guard nor a kapo; who received no preferential treatment except that which she ``organized'' for herself; who was so honest that she was chosen unanimously by over a hundred starving women to divide ten Red Cross packages that somehow made it into their block. Gelissen explains that it was precisely because she was on the first transport that she lived: As the Nazis were perfecting their death machine, she was honing her ``organizing'' skills, learning to acquire things through barter and cunning. When her sister Danka contracted malaria, for example, she got her quinine with the help of sympathetic fellow Polish male prisoners. She arranged for Danka and herself to be chosen by Dr. Mengele for what she believed would be easier, indoor work, but discovering that they had been chosen instead for experiments, Gelissen pulled Danka off the doomed line and the two blended back into camp life. Later, as winter approached, Gelissen had herself and Danka chosen by Mengele again, this time for the relatively humane laundry detail, where they worked until the death marches that immediately preceded liberation. Despite the interpolations and footnotes of Gelissen's coauthor, a freelance writer who doesn't seem to fully understand the culture of prewar Polish Jewry and who provides verification in an unnecessary attempt to strengthen Gelissen's testimony, this is an uplifting tale of courage and humanity.