| Name: |
Carol Matas |
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"I thought you were all dead. Didn't the gas ovens finish you all off""
In After the War, this is the welcome a Jewish teenager, Ruth, receives from her now-dead family's former maid, who, Ruth notices, is wearing one of Mother's dresses. It is 1945, and Ruth, recently liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp, has made her way back home to her village in Poland. She realizes home is now a memory, an idea--not a place. Young Daniel, in Daniel's Story, comes to a similar realization at a train station where Polish farm boys beat to death his friend Peter, while onlookers do nothing to help. Daniel, Peter, and Daniel's father have survived the Nazi death camps and are starting their lives over. Having witnessed and endured unspeakable acts, they are weak and numb but finally free. Yet their triumph is cut to the quick by the young thugs' menacing taunts: "What have we got here? Two Jews who escaped the gas""
Ruth, Daniel, Peter, and Daniel's father--all characters in novels by Carol Matas--represent the minority of people who survived the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's systematic elimination of some six million European Jews.
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