I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz by Eva Mozes Kor, Danica Davidson
on April 5, 2022
Genres: Autobiography, Children's, Family & Relationships, Juvenile, Middle Grade, Nonfiction, Biography, War, WW II, Historical, Holocaust
Pages: 240
Source: Netgalley
Format: ARC, eBook
Find the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
ISBN: 031646063X
Rating:
The illuminating and deeply moving true story of twin sisters who survived Nazi experimentation, against all odds, during the Holocaust.
Eva and her identical twin sister, Miriam, had a mostly happy childhood. Theirs was the only Jewish family in their small village in the Transylvanian mountains, but they didn't think much of it until anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in their school. Then, in 1944, ten-year-old Eva and her family were deported to Auschwitz. At its gates, Eva and Miriam were separated from their parents and other siblings, selected as subjects for Dr. Mengele's infamous medical experiments.
During the course of the war, Mengele would experiment on 3,000 twins. Only 160 would survive--including Eva and Miriam.
Writing with her friend Danica Davidson, Eva reveals how two young girls were able to survive the unimaginable cruelty of the Nazi regime, while also eventually finding healing and the capacity to forgive. Spare and poignant, I Will Protect You is a vital memoir of survival, loss, and forgiveness.
This is a book that I plan on buying and making my kids read. Told from the perspective of Eva Mozes Kor as a young child, with her twin sister, Miriam–I Will Protect You is Eva’s story of how she vowed to protect her sister in the midst of the Holocaust.
Eva and Miriam were just two of the many twins taken for experiments by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. At the time the girls were merely nine years old, taken from their father, mother, and two sisters, and were subjected to horrible, life-altering experiments.
The whole point of Eva’s life in her later years was to educate people of what the Holocaust was really like. It was to help people understand so that history wouldn’t be repeated.
This book, although geared for younger readers, is appropriate for all ages. It definitely made me feel–sadness, anger, grief… And it will be a book I suggest to anyone who would like to know more about the horrors of the holocaust. Thanks to Danica Davidson, who helped write this stunning children’s book, Eva’s story will be forever captured. I can’t wait to share this with my family!
About Danica Davidson
I'm the author of 18 books for young people, including the middle grade Holocaust book I Will Protect You (Little, Brown), which I created with survivor Eva Mozes Kor. Eva and I worked closely together on this book, and she passed away right after we accepted Little, Brown's offer. This is her legacy to children. A free book club guide from Little, Brown is available here, and would be great to use in classrooms.
About Eva Mozes Kor
Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian survivor of the Holocaust. Along with her twin sister Miriam, Kor was subjected to human experimentation at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. She lost both of her parents and two older sisters to the Holocaust; only she and Miriam survived. Kor founded the organization CANDLES (an acronym for "Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors") in 1984 and through this program located 122 other survivors. In 1984 Kor founded the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center to educate the public about eugenics, the Holocaust, and the power of forgiveness.
