But soon the killing in the ghetto ratchets up, the death camp trains are running nonstop - and one night Max, the oldest Diamant son, jumps from one of those trains and knocks on Stefania's door in the middle of the night.
All the while she spends her days scrounging food and supplies for the Diamants and figuring out ways to get it all to them. She takes in her 6-year-old sister, Helena, who's been left to a brutal neighbor after the Nazis take her mother and brother to a work camp, leaving the farm to ruin. Then the Nazis take over the town, and she's left alone in their house as the family's dragged off to the ghetto. In a few years, she's practically family, and indeed she and Izio, one of the sons who's in medical school, are in love - something they keep to themselves because she's Catholic and he's Jewish.
THE LIGHT IN HIDDEN PLACES begins in 1936 in the small town of Przemyśl, Poland, where 13-year-old Stefania Podgórska is thrilled to leave the family farm and go to work for the Diamants, a Jewish family who keep a store in town. The book is a labor of love for author Cameron, who enjoyed access to Podgórska's memoir and family members and, according to Stefania's son, got his mother's voice just right. What also continues throughout the story is indomitable spirit, unexpected kindness and luck, a lot of determination and quick thinking, and in spite of all the darkness, love.
Before the story even gets under way, several members of the Jewish family who took her in as a 13-year-old Catholic farm girl have been brutally, heartbreakingly murdered by the Nazis, and atrocities (including shooting entire Jewish families and the Catholic families who sheltered them) continue throughout the story. Parents need to know that Sharon Cameron's The Light in Hidden Places is a historical novel based on the true story of Stefania Podgórska, who, as a teen in Poland, sheltered 13 Jews from the Nazis in the attic of the apartment she shared with her little sister. Adults drink alcohol, and sometimes do so to excess.ĭid you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide. Adult characters smoke cigarettes (and complain bitterly when they can't get them).
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