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After sixty years, Kristine Keese is finally able to share the memories of her years spent in the Warsaw Ghetto as a small child. She owes her survival, and that of her young uncle, to the striking resourcefulness of her mother. The story emerges as vividly as if it happened yesterday, full of details that only a child would notice. Although the the events of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of its victims has been described many times, Keese's story is exceptional, as it is told through the eyes of, not a victim, but a child engaged with her daily reality focused on survival.
Price: $23.00
Pages: 160
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Imprint: Academic Studies Press
Series: Jews of Poland
Publication Date:
29 September 2016
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781618115096
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“Twelve-year-old Kristine arrived in New York City in 1946. When she tried to tell her story to her new American schoolmates they did not believe her. Seventy years later she tells the story she had thought best to put aside then. With uncanny sobriety and a wondrous memory for visual detail, Kristine Keese narrates her time in the Warsaw Ghetto and later as a hidden child on the so-called “Aryan Side.” She revisits the eight year-old girl wearing high heels and a kerchief so that she could go to work beside her mother. She writes of her mother’s ingenuity, her stepfather’s coldness, and the surreal view of brightly-colored flowers from the bridge in the Warsaw Ghetto. Keese’s self-reflective attempt to understand what was humanly possible has meaning far beyond the particularities of Germans, Jews and Poles during the Second World War. In her story, told with no melodrama and no self-pity, we see the universal through the particular.”
— Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University
— Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University
Kristine Keese, born to a middle class Jewish family in Poland, was incarcerated as an eight year old child in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war the family emigrated to New York. Kristine earned a BA in philosophy from Cornell University and an EdD from Harvard School of Education. She worked as a social science researcher and an educator, most recently in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She resigned from academia to live and work on her husband's fishing boat. They fished commercially along the coast of Florida, spent a year in Haiti and later fished in Alaska where she also worked as an educational evaluator for Native American education. She and her husband later owned and operated an organic cranberry bog in Massachusetts. Kristine Keese passed away at the age of 82 in October 2016.
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: My Personal War
Chapter 2: 1939: The Clouds of War
Chapter 3: November 1940–July 1942: The Ghetto, First Stages
Chapter 4: The Ghetto, Last Stages
Chapter 5: The End of Safety
Chapter 6: Jasio’s Story and Leaving the Ghetto
Chapter 7: Times of High Anxiety
Chapter 8: August–August 1944: The Warsaw Uprising
Chapter 9: Leaving Warsaw
Chapter 10: Waiting for the War to End
Chapter 11: Spring 1945: Return to the Convent
Chapter 12: Living with Genia in Lodz
Afterword: What is Left???
Illustrations
Index