The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister by Nonna BannisterThe Secret Holocaust Diaries of Nonna Bannister is the narrative of an adolescent Russian girl whose idyllic life is transformed by the horrors of the Second World War. Walks in the park with her mother, language lessons with her father, and holidays in ther grandmother's Great House come to an abrupt end as war comes to her family, separating them as they struggle to survive.
Nonna witnesses first-hand the abuse of starving, freezing German soldiers who stab her dead father through the chest as he lay in bed--after weeks of suffering from injuries inflicted by other German soldiers who had found him hiding in a tunnel connected to a root cellar at her grandmother's home.
Nonna and her mother, Anna, forage for food in the fields and make temporary homes in the abandoned houses of villages whose residents were driven out by retreating Russians or marauding Germans. They rescue a Jewish baby tossed onto a train by her mother only to witness the baby's murder as a Nazi soldier snaps the baby like a twig. They endure the indignities of life in slave labor camps. They are afforded a modicum of comfort when the Nazis discover Nonna's mother's talents as a painter, singer, and violinist. However, when Anna is too tired to perform any more, Gestapo agents break her arms and leave her without medical care.
Throughout the war, Nonna keeps her diaries secreted in a little down pillow that her grandmother had made for her. These diaries survive the war and travel to America with Nonna when she emigrates from Germany in 1950. She keeps to herself the stories they tell until late in her life, when she shares her own translations of them with her husband.
The sole member of her family to survive the war, Nonna becomes a wife and mother of three children in the US. She died in 2004.
Though the pages of these diaries are filled with horrors that defy the imagination, the fact of their being written by a teenaged girl who would go on to live a good and productive life shows that integrity and honesty can trump evil. That Nonna Bannister has the grace to forgive those men who savagely tore her life apart speaks to the power of the soul to heal itself by choosing grace.
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