Believers in America Book

This is an autobiographical account from a teenage girl of life in Warsaw from just before the war until its end. It covers the period of the Warsaw ghetto, which, as Jews Bauman and her family were confined to. We follow Bauman and her extended family through ups and downs via memory and some diary excerpts. Initially the family are quite well off, but once the Nazis invade Poland all that changes and Bauman, her mother and sister spend much of their time in hiding or on the run. Throughout the account the reader also sees Bauman grow up into a young woman.
From a middle class life the reader is taken onto the streets of the ghetto where dead bodies lie in the street. Bauman is honest about her account, honest about her own failings and those around her. She is trying to live an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances and trying to find her own identity. The second half of the book is increasingly tense as after the destruction of the ghetto the family hide on the "Aryan" side of the city. They have to move regularly as hiding places are discovered or blackmailers find them: there is a thriving trade in blackmailing Jews in hiding. There are loses as friends and family are caught, some killed, some sent away to camps. With the destruction of Warsaw in the last few months of the war the family end up in a country village.
This is the first of Bauman's autobiographical writings, she has been referred to as a sociologist of modern life. She writes with poignancy and warmth and even with some humour. Bauman finds the hiding frustrating, but it can't entirely hide her teenage thoughts and fantasies:
"Perhaps we've been wasting the last bits of our lives not even trying to find out what love is"
Bauman was still obsessed with books, boys and romance and there is still that spark there despite the horrors. She is able to reflect at a distance:
"During the war I learned the truth we usually chose to leave unsaid: that the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions"
This is a moving and very human account of Warsaw and its Jewish community and Bauman is an excellent narrator.