Tenuous Threads/One of the Lucky Ones

I had always liked to play make-believe, but somehow they made me understand that this game was real. I never gave away my secret.

Two Jewish girls born six months apart — Judy Abrams in Hungary and Eva Felsenburg Marx in Czechoslovakia — are only children when they are thrown into the turmoil and terror of World War II. At seven, Judy’s mother leaves her at a convent where she must adopt a new Christian identity. Eva is first sent away at two, then again at six, in disguise and tearful. Separated from their parents, forced to “pass” as Christian children, coping with dangers they barely understand, these evocative and lyrical memoirs describe childhoods irrevocably marked by the Holocaust. Tenuous Threads and One of the Lucky Ones tell us the parallel but unique stories of two children who were able to survive when so many others perished.