My Mother's Secret: Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J. L. Witterick
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My Mother's Secret: Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J. L. Witterick
Download Ebook My Mother's Secret: Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J. L. Witterick
Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic-each party completely unknown to the others. For everyone to survive, Franciszka will have to outsmart her neighbors and the German commander. Told simply and succinctly from four different perspectives, My Mother's Secret is a testament to the kindness, courage, and generosity of ordinary people who chose to be extraordinary.
My Mother's Secret: Based on a True Holocaust Story, by J. L. Witterick- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.30" h x 1.10" w x 6.40" l,
- Running time: 2 Hours
- Binding: Audio CD
Review "A reflection of our own era, a reminder of how far wrong we can be led�an important book." ---Joseph Kertes, author of Gratitude
About the Author Originally from Taiwan, J. L. Witterick has been living in Canada since her family's arrival in 1968. She attended the University of Western Ontario, graduating from the Richard Ivey School of Business. Her debut novel, My Mother's Secret, has been published in several countries around the world.AudioFile Earphones Award winner Elizabeth Wiley is a seasoned actor, dialect coach, theater professor, and dedicated narrator. She brings over twenty-five years of award-winning acting and voice experience to the studio to create memorable, compelling storytelling.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part I
HELENA
Chapter 1
When you’re a child, you think that your parents are the same as everyone else’s and that what happens in your house happens in other people’s homes too. You have no way of knowing any differently.
And so, I think that everyone is afraid of their father. I think that men marry to have someone cook and clean for them. I don’t know that some men actually love their wives and their children.
My brother, Damian, and I grow up with two very different people.
My father is precise, hard, and linear, while my mother is imaginative, loving, and warm.
Both are strong.
My father is Ukrainian and my mother is Polish, but we moved to Germany, where the opportunities are better than in Poland.
My father is a machinist, and that suits him well because it requires precision and measurement—both skills he possesses in abundance.
My mother works as a cook for a wealthy German family, and we love that she often brings leftovers home for us. She brings food that we never would have tasted otherwise. Not much usually, but there are sometimes small pieces of expensive meats like pork chops and, if we’re lucky, fruits and nuts, which are luxuries for most people.
When there are leftovers, my mother puts them all on a plate for us to share. Even though we would have already eaten the dinner cooked ahead for us in the morning, it’s a special treat that we all look forward to. Typically, my father gorges himself, reaching for more even while he’s still chewing with his mouth partly open.
Once as I am about to pick up a slice of apple from the plate, my father slaps my hand. It is something that he wants.
My mother sees this and shakes her head. The next week she keeps a whole apple in her pocket and only brings it out after my father starts the loud, snorting sound that is his snore when asleep.
She cuts the apple in half and gives it to my brother and me.
I don’t know why, but I remember what happens next more than I remember how my father treats me. I can hear the words from my brother as if he has just said them: “Lena,” he says, using his nickname for me, “you know I ate so much for dinner that I really don’t want anything else. Why don’t you have my half too?”
I shake my head. “You can eat this, Damian.” But he refuses and makes me take it.
It makes the apple even sweeter than it already is.
My father, not having seen a trace of an apple for some time, asks, “Why aren’t you bringing home any apples, Franciszka?”
My mother shrugs her shoulders and says, “I work there; I don’t shop there. I can only bring home what they give me.”
My brother and I look at each other and then down because, if we didn’t, he would have seen our smiles.
• • •
TWO STRONG PEOPLE living together is not easy to begin with, but two strong people with opposing political views—that’s virtually impossible.
My father is a Nazi sympathizer, and my mother is horrified by it.
“Hitler is the answer to the problems of the German people,” my father says.
Just a few years ago no one had even heard of Hitler, but now it seems like his name is everywhere. His wave of popularity is swelling. People are poor and unemployment is high. Hitler promises better times. He tells the German people that they are superior.
“Germany will be a great power again if Hitler is the leader,” my father says. His fellow workers at the machine shop are all going to vote for him.
“If you’re German and someone tells you that you’re born superior, that would sound pretty good,” my mother says.
“Even better if the bad times are not your fault but caused by the Jewish people. It’s so much easier than trying to explain it logically.”
My mother doesn’t pass judgment on groups of people. She believes in the individual.
“Not all Germans are good or bad, and the same with Jews,” she says.
She’s outspoken and says what she believes.
They have shouting matches over this, and while my brother and I stay quiet, we don’t like what Hitler is promising. We heard Hitler speak once and saw the hypnotic power that he had over people.
He has that effect on our father.
• • •
MY FATHER DOESN’T ARGUE WITH FACTS. He makes his points with attacks on the other person.
He doesn’t fight fair.
“What do you know about politics?” he says to my mother. “Cooking makes you smart, does it?”
“It doesn’t make you blind” is what she says.
I think to myself, I will never marry anyone like my father.
Chapter 2
I don’t know if my mother ever loved my father.
Maybe love isn’t something that people value when it’s hard just to get by.
Damian and I are constantly worried that our father, so quick to anger, will strike her in one of their arguments.
Being slight and about half his size, my mother would be seriously injured.
She never backs down in their arguments, so it is my brother and I who fear.
We want to grow up so desperately.
Chapter 3
As predicted by my father, Hitler becomes chancellor on January 30, 1933.
Seven months later, a law is introduced to ban the formation of parties.
Now . . . there is no stopping the Nazi machine.
Chapter 4
It may have been as subtle as the sight of a small robin sitting on our windowsill in the early days of spring that makes my mother think, This simple bird has the freedom to fly anywhere, and yet here we stay.
Or maybe it’s just what is practical. Leave when you have enough money set aside.
Regardless, one uneventful day, she tells my father that she has decided to move back to Poland. This is the same as saying she is leaving him because he has on many occasions said that he would never return to a country he felt was backward compared to Germany.
At this point, my brother is eighteen and I am two years younger, so we can make our own decision in terms of whom we will live with.
In reality, there’s no decision to make.
We respect that she stands up to my father, who promises a secure lifestyle for obedience.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s because we never felt close to our father that we embraced the values of our mother. It’s hard to say how we become the people we do. My mother believes that it comes from our choices. She says, “If you choose to do the right thing, it’s a conscious decision at first. Then it becomes second nature. You don’t have to think about what is right because doing the right thing becomes who you are, like a reflex. Your actions with time become your character.”
“If you leave, don’t come back,” are my father’s last words to us.
Chapter 5
We don’t take much when we leave.
Fortunately, my mother has been smart enough to keep some of her earnings hidden from my father.
With her savings, my mother buys a small house with some land for raising chickens and growing vegetables in her hometown of Sokal, Poland.
Sokal is located a day’s wagon ride from Warsaw. There’s a river with majestic willow trees lining the banks that runs through town. In the summer, it has a carefree feel to it.
The people living here form three distinct communities: Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish.
The Ukrainians don’t trust the Poles, the Poles don’t trust the Ukrainians, and they both don’t trust the Jews. There exists a certain friction that has been dulled by time but is never gone.
A few wealthy families live in Sokal, but most of the people are of modest means. Just about everyone works hard for what they have.
The more expensive homes in town are made from bricks. However, the majority of people live in homes made from wooden boards that are considerably cheaper. Fireplaces are used to keep warm in the winter, when it can be mercilessly cold. It’s not unusual for people to wear almost as much to keep warm indoors as outdoors in the coldest months.
For water, people go to a well that’s in their neighborhood. Farmers sell their produce and meats in the market, where most people shop. Only those with money shop in the stores, which carry imported goods from Germany and other places.
At the market, my mother sells eggs from our chickens, and garden vegetables that she grows in season. My brother works at an oil refinery a few towns away, so we only see him on his days off. He brings supplies and takes care of us more than my father ever did.
When my brother comes to visit, the first thing he does is pick me up and whirl me around as if I were a small child. I am dizzy with this but love the feeling. Over six feet in height, he towers above me. I have to look up at him because I am barely taller than my five-foot mother.
“I don’t know how two plain-looking people like your father and I could have produced such attractive children,” my mother says.
It seems we did inherit the best features from both our parents.
I have my father’s brown eyes and chestnut hair, which flows with a natural wave hinting at its origin from his tight curls. My brother has my mother’s fair skin and light hair, and I am envious of their gray, sparkling eyes.
Damian always brings me an apple when he comes to visit.
It’s love and sacrifice disguised as a piece of fruit.
He brings my mother chewing tobacco, which she adores.
On my seventeenth birthday, Damian surprises me with an apple tree. “Now you can have apples whenever you like, Lena. You don’t have to wait for me anymore,” he says. “Show me where you want it planted.”
I choose a spot just outside my window. It will be the first thing I see when I wake up.
I can’t wait until I can earn money too. I want to surprise him with a present, and I already have something in mind.
There is a beautiful brown leather jacket in a store on the way to the market, which would be perfect for Damian.
I keep thinking to myself, Please, please don’t let anyone else buy it before I can get the money.
Chapter 6
In the local newspaper, there’s an ad for a secretarial position, assisting the general manager of a garment factory in town. I confide to my mother that even though my chances are slim, I want to try. “There are going to be so many girls competing for this job,” I say.
She says to me, “Do you remember when you first learned how to type? You wanted to be faster than anyone else in your class, but we didn’t have a typewriter so you drew the keyboard on a piece of paper and practiced as if you were really typing. You always wanted to be the best, Helena, and you practiced day and night. Your teacher told me that she never had a student who could type eighty words a minute. You were the top in your class then, so why shouldn’t you be selected for this job now? Besides, how many girls speak German as beautifully as you?”
I already knew everything she was telling me, but there are times when it feels good to hear what you already know.
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Most helpful customer reviews
50 of 53 people found the following review helpful. Deceptively Profound By Spudman Impact, significance, and inspiration don't depend on excessive description, fancy sentence structure, book length , or high brow vocabulary by an author. Rather, true sincerity, deep emotion and a well-told story can make a greater and lasting impression on a reader.At first I found the simplicity of J.L. Witterick's "My Mother's Secret" a bit disarming which made me all the more vulnerable to the shocking events and pathos to come. The book is easy to read with its short chapters and first person narrative. It's like reading someone's personal diary, but it this case like reading four of them, all harmoniously blending and intersecting to create a story that's profound, stunning, and inspirational.A reader might be initially confused by the sudden change in narrators, but the author's purpose quickly becomes clear, as does the kindness, strength, and selflessness of the main character.I highly recommend this wonderful book set mostly in Poland in the dark days of WWII, one that shows the extremes of the goodness and the evil in human nature. It's a book that lingers in one's consciousness long after the last page is turned.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful. A good introduction to the Holocaust - 4.5 stars By Dienne J.L. Witterick tells a complex and harrowing tale of courage and silent resistance in brief, almost poetic language. Although the book is marked as "Young Adult", it would be appropriate for any children old enough to begin learning about horrors such as the Holocaust (in fact, it could be an excellent introductory text in a league with THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK), as well as being haunting and appealing for adult readers.We are told that the book is a fictionalized account of an actual woman, Franciszka Halamajowa, and her daughter who hid fifteen Jews and one reluctant German soldier during the Nazi invasion of Poland in World War II. We are not sure how much of the book is real and how much is fiction. The fictional Franciszka saves seven Jews (and the German soldier) and has barely enough room for that many, not to mention the difficulty of procuring enough food for so many without attracting undue attention. Imagine the reality of sheltering twice that many.The story is told in five separate sections. The first and last are told from the point of view of Helena, Franciszka's grown daughter. Helena, rather unexpectedly, finds herself mutually in love with the owner of the factory where she works as a secretary. When Casmir's father calls him home to Germany during his terminal illness, Casmir wants Helena to come with him and marry him. However, Helena, though she badly wants to go with Casmir, feels she must stay and help her mother guard her secret.The scene shifts rather abruptly from Helena's point of view to Bronek's, leaving us a little disoriented wondering what happened to the story we had been so engrossed in. But soon enough we figure out that Bronek is the father of one of the families that Franciszka is sheltering - in the shed above the pigsty of all places. Bronek manages to save his sister-in-law after his brother's death, as well as his own wife and her son (whom he's adopted as his own), but they can't save their own baby as she is too little and her crying would endanger them all.The transition to Mikolaj's point of view and later to Vilheim's are more expected and therefore less jarring. Mikolaj is the son of a Jewish doctor who thought his position would protect him, and therefore did not get away in time. He and his parents take shelter in a space dug beneath Franciszka's table. Vilheim, the tender-hearted, vegetarian German soldier, takes refuge with Franciszka to avoid being sent on to Russia where he knows he would have to - but couldn't - kill. He is consigned to the loft, which is so low cannot even sit upright. While the two Jewish families are aware of each other (but don't meet), neither is aware of Vilheim, nor is he aware of them.The book does not delve too deeply into the misery of 20 months of extreme confinement. We know that each group is able to leave their shelter only rarely, very briefly and very discreetly. We learn a little about how they pass the endless dark days and the amusements they make up, but Witterick does not dwell on the issue. Likewise, we learn little about how bathroom and hygiene matters were handled. Both Mikolaj and Vilheim suffer illness during their confinement, but both recover and, again, Witterick does not dwell on the issue. And if there is any fault in the book, it would be the glossing over of the overwhelming sorrow and trauma of the giving up of Bronek's baby.What Witterick does focus on is the humble grace with which Franciszka opens her home and her heart to unspeakable risks, and the gratitude and stoicism with which her "guests" receive her generosity. Franciszka is so brave that she capitalizes on Casmir's connections to Nazi officers by inviting them to dinner, while Mikolaj and his family hide beneath their very feet. Even after she loses her own son (and major supplier), Franciszka soldiers on protecting the sons of strangers. If she has any doubts, fears or complaints, they make no appearance in the book. Helena, on the other hand, is portrayed as more human, with plenty of doubts and fears, and even a hint of resentment for her own sacrifice, although it all works out in the end.With only a few understated examples of brutality, this is about as gentle an introduction to the Holocaust as you're likely to find. The brutality of the Nazi invasion and the genocide of the Jews is certainly present in the story, but mostly as a menacing but shadowy backdrop to the bravery, resourcefulness and basic decency of Franciszka, Helena, Damian, Casmir and the eight people whose lives they saved. Definitely recommended for ages 12 and up, and probably appropriate for classroom instruction in most junior high/middle schools.Please note, I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful. Goodness prevails despite all odds By Vibha Verma A lot has been chronicled about the events that led to World War II, the barbarity that many underwent during that time, the unhealed scars, the aftermaths of the war and widespread destruction that those years caused. This period is nothing short of a black mark on the face of humankind.Having said that, if times like these bring out the worst in many, many rise much above the rest, forgetting their personal security and survival to epitomize a true human. These ordinary individuals with their compassion and sympathy become angels for others. And the more we read about such individuals the lesser it is. J.K. Witterick is one author who wanted to write to make a difference. Through 'My Mother's Secret', she brings out a courageous story of a mother and a daughter based on a true story in the times of Holocaust.Franciszka takes a firm decision to leave Germany and her Nazi sympathizer husband for Poland when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Her elder son Damian and daughter Helena are more than pleased to leave their father. Poland at that point was a melting pot of people who were Polish, Ukrainians and Jews, though all mistrusting each other.Piece by piece Franciszka built a decent life for her children but it was not lost on them that Poland would soon be taken over by Germany and that happened in 1939 with complete invasion in 1941 disrespecting the pact that was signed by Hitler and Stalin.Franciszka and Helena were not immune to the happenings around them either. They could chose to save their skin over being philanthropic but magnanimous hearts find it hard to see helplessness and yet remain inactive. They ended up hiding two Jewish families and a German soldier in their house for not just a day or two but for 20 odd months. All through this time Helena had to undergo a pain in the heart for hiding this secret from the love of her life, her fiancé.The stories of Jewish families and that of German soldier build up separately and it is amazing to read how their paths led them to the house of their benefactress Franciszka. The foresightedness, intelligence and selflessness of the mother saw all of them through this difficult time and eventually all did come out from the hiding to lead their normal lives.The book though set at the most unfortunate of times manages to evoke warm and uplifting feelings. After the story ends the readers are left with hope and belief in the goodness of individuals rather than bad taste for the savagery which dominated that time. My Mother's Secret is one of those books that are perfect to introduce young adults to the historical happenings. It is supposed to be the author's first creation yet she handles the subject with utmost care and sensitivity. A wonderful piece of writing.Worth mentioning quotes are sprinkled all over the narrative and this goes on to reiterate how adversity brings out the best in people and how sometimes smooth sailing makes a race impassive.A few excerpts from the book -"If you choose to do the right thing, it's a conscious decision at first. Then it becomes second nature.""I always thought that courageous people were those who were not afraid. Meeting Franciszka and her daughter, I realize thatcourageous people are afraid like everyone else. They just act despite the fear."
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