Author Description

From the Introduction... I drafted the text of a children's story called Refugee: The True Story of a Girl, a Bear, and the Holocaust, and kept meeting periodically with Sophie to clarify events and chronology. When we got together, sometimes at a café near her apartment, I tried not to overstay my welcome, since I continued to feel that I had subtly pressured her into sharing the details of a story she otherwise would have been content to relate only sparingly, and in passing. As time went on, however, the adventures of Sophie's bear became inseparable from an infinitely more complex and tragic story that could hardly be contained by a few hundred words aimed at six-year-olds. A year and a half after I left my friends' seder with an idea for a children's book, I realized that I was actually on a longer and more intense serendipitous journey toward a book for grown-ups, one that would eventually embrace the stories of three other hidden child survivors. Sophie, it turned out, was my portal into the world of the very few and very lucky Jewish children who emerged from World War II, our last living witnesses to the Holocaust. Between 1 and 1.5 million Jewish children were living in Europe before the war, but only 6 to 11 percent survived, compared to a third of Jewish adults. Of these child survivors, who numbered between 60,000 and 165,000 children, some had survived the death and work camps, while the rest survived by hiding or being hidden.