Clara's War

(Paperback)

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NO ONE COULD TELL ME THAT DESPITE THE OCCASIONAL POGROM, I WASN'T BORN INTO THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS' - Clara Kramer. Clara Kramer was a typical Polish Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, her family home was given to a Volksdeutsch family, the Becks. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Mr. Beck took in told the Kramers and two other Jewish families. Although he didn't "like" Jews he did not think they should be killed. 18 people in all, went to live in a bunker dug out of the basement. They were confident that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. But the weeks turned into 18 months. Clara was 14 years old when she entered the bunker. An avid reader, she kept a diary, writing with a blue pencil in a little notebook. She wrote down details of their confined life - no one could hide anything from each other in the bunker, and their proximity to the Becks - with only floorboards separating them- meant she was aware of everything going on upstairs as well. As time went by, the two parallel worlds becam

Author Bio

Clara Kramer is now 80 years old. Based in New Jersey, she founded a Holocaust and Prejudice Reduction Center at Kean University which trains 1200 teachers annually. She still speaks about her experiences between 50 and 100 times a year.