Alona Frankel, author of the best-sell­ing Once Upon A Pot­ty, now offers read­ers an insight into her own child­hood. Her par­ents were edu­cat­ed, Pol­ish Jew­ish Com­mu­nists— ​“non­re­li­gious Jews,” as her father put it. Alona was only two years old when the Nazis invad­ed Poland. When the ghet­to was ​“liq­ui­dat­ed,” a Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly agreed to hide her moth­er and father in a work­room in their apart­ment, but wouldn’t allow them to bring their baby; a young child could make noise at the wrong moment and get every­one killed. So Alona’s par­ents paid a woman to pre­tend their daugh­ter was Chris­t­ian and board her in the coun­try­side. Alas, when her par­ents’ mea­ger resources ran out, the deal end­ed. The woman sim­ply dropped off Alona at her par­ents’ hid­den room where she wasn’t allowed, forc­ing Alona to hide from both the Nazis and from her par­ents’ host fam­i­ly. Still, the three of them sur­vived and after the war restart­ed their lives in what became social­ist Poland. This might have been a good fit for a pair of Com­mu­nists, except the anti-Semi­tism prob­lem hadn’t dis­ap­peared like it was sup­posed to. In the end there was only one viable option — aliyah.

The sto­ry of a girl hid­ing with her fam­i­ly in a secret room dur­ing the Holo­caust, nat­u­ral­ly brings to mind Anne Frank. But Frank was a teenag­er, con­fid­ing her thoughts and feel­ings to her diary. Alona was so young, she had to be taught a sim­pli­fied, sur­vival ver­sion of real­i­ty: there was a ​“war in the world,” and there was an ​“Aryan side of the world,” where Aryans had life but Jews got death (except she was not to use the term ​“Zyd” or Jew, but ​“the chil­dren of light” instead). While her family’s faith that ​“Tovar­ish Stal­in” would save them was painful­ly iron­ic, it did stave off despair, which helped them sur­vive. So there is a trag­ic dif­fer­ence between Anne Frank and Alona Frankel as well: the Nazis mur­dered Anne Frank, so she nev­er had the chance to revis­it her expe­ri­ences from the per­spec­tive of an old­er woman, as Alona did.

Frankel tells her sto­ry in the voice of a child. Sig­nif­i­cant events are repeat­ed­ly retold, retold, and retold before the nar­ra­tive moves for­ward, as if obey­ing some recur­sive sto­ry­telling rule nev­er to go for­ward with­out tak­ing a few steps back­wards. As she recalls var­i­ous inci­dents, she repeats key phras­es (“I cried, cried, and cried”) three times, recall­ing the three wish­es in fairy tales. Her reluc­tance to tell every­thing at once, a sort of stub­born with­hold­ing, almost pre­pares read­ers for her unpleas­ant sto­ries. From the ​“cof­fin” she sleeps in, to her fas­ci­na­tion with the fleas and lice and roach­es and bed­bugs she lived with, to the pair of mice she and her father ​“trained,” or the dead rat she adopt­ed, the facts of the sto­ries are reit­er­at­ed again and again, each time with anoth­er detail added.

We are remind­ed that there is noth­ing lin­ear about the process of mem­o­ry, espe­cial­ly when it car­ries such enor­mous emo­tion­al weight. The trau­ma Frankel went through was real, even if it wasn’t acknowl­edged. It seeps out every time she describes the sur­vivors who came to her par­ents’ apart­ment, who rolled up their sleeves so the num­bers showed, and told the sto­ries of the loved ones who did not make it. As Frankel says, ​“it was exhaust­ing, depress­ing, repel­lent, bor­ing. And it always made me feel guilty.”

Like many Holo­caust mem­oirs, Frankel’s is filled with unre­solved pain, but there is some­thing about her child­like wis­dom that makes us listen.

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