A Mothers Courage: How I survived the Holocaust a remarkable story of bravery, kindness and hope

Description

‘A deeply humane memoir, of immense power – there is nothing more affecting than a first hand experience finely told’ – PHILIPPE SANDS

A Mothers Courage is Holocaust survivor Malka Levines powerful and moving tribute to a determined and resourceful woman who refused to give up hope so long as her children needed her.

Malka was two when the Nazi invaders forced her family into the Jewish ghetto in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, a small city in present-day Ukraine. It was the first step in a campaign of mass murder. Of the 25,000 Jews in the city in 1939, only 30 would survive. Malkas father was shot in the first pogrom, but before he died he begged her mother Rivka to save the children.

Rivka kept Malka and her two older brothers alive through eighteen terrifying months, as the Nazis systematically killed the inhabitants of the ghetto. In the midst of the inhumanity, a few people risked their lives to help. A Wehrmacht officer saved them from being shot and a Polish dressmaker gave them sanctuary when the SS went hunting for victims.

Then Rivka persuaded Mr and Mrs Yakimchuk, a Ukrainian farmer and his saintly wife, to hide her and the children. The Yakimchuks agreed and kept their word, even after the SS commandeered the farm. They dug a pit under their barn, and there Malkas family stayed through a freezing winter and into the summer until the Red Army came. At the end of the war, Rivka was forced to draw on her strength yet again as she set out to create a new life for herself and her children.

A Mothers Courage is Malkas chance at long last to thank not only her brave mum but all the heroes who opened their hearts to her and her family.

Author Information

Malka Levine was born in Volodymyr in what is today north-western Ukraine. After the Holocaust her mother took Malka and her brothers to live in Israel. Malka married a British journalist and moved to Britain. Today she is widowed with two children and lives near Nottingham. She appeared in the documentary Getting Away With Murders, an investigation into why so many perpetrators of the Holocaust went unpunished. Our Mother’s Courage is her first book.