'A deeply humane memoir of immense power - there is nothing more affecting than a first-hand experience finely told' - PHILIPPE SANDS
'A fabulous memoir . . . a testament to [Malka's] skill and determination' - DAME MAUREEN LIPMAN
A Mother’s Courage is Holocaust survivor Malka Levine’s powerful and moving tribute to a determined and resourceful woman who refused to give up hope so long as her children needed her.
Malka was two when the Nazi invaders forced her family into the Jewish ghetto in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, a small city in present-day Ukraine. It was the first step in a campaign of mass murder. Of the 25,000 Jews in the city in 1939, only thirty would survive. Malka’s father was shot in the first pogrom, but before he died he begged her mother Rivka to ‘save the children’.
Rivka kept Malka and her two older brothers alive through eighteen terrifying months as the Nazis systematically killed the inhabitants of the ghetto. In the midst of the inhumanity, a few people risked their lives to help. A Wehrmacht officer saved them from being shot and a Polish dressmaker gave them sanctuary when the SS went hunting for victims.
Rivka persuaded a grumpy Ukrainian farmer and his saintly wife, the Yakimchuks, to hide her and the children. The Yakimchuks agreed and kept their word, even after the SS commandeered the farm. They dug a pit under their barn, and there Malka’s family stayed through a freezing winter and into the summer until the Red Army came. At the end of the war, Rivka was forced to draw on her strength yet again as she set out to create a new life for herself and her children.
A Mother’s Courage is Malka’s chance at long last to thank not only her brave mum, but also all the heroes who opened their hearts to her and her family.
Grace
2025-01-20
Absolutely amazing book. Written with compassion and love. In utmost grateful that the author talked about current Ukraine both in the beginning as well as in the end of the book and that she said straight forward that Russia is the aggressor against Ukraine and are waging a genocidal war against Ukraine! Thank you so much for interlacing the past and the present events, even though this book isn’t about current Ukraine, but about the war mongering Nazis during the holocaust and their brutal execution of Jews, Roma Sentia, homosexuals, and other non wanted people during the NSDAP’s reign between 19333-1945! Let’s pray as we’re closing up at the third year of Russia’s war against Ukraine finally this year, 2025 can find a solution for peace on Ukraine’s terms. After all it is the Russians who started this unprovoked war and they should go out from this war without any “wins”, what the Russians needs to understand urgently is they all need to repent and pay for restauration of everything they have levelled down in Ukraine, or more correctly the Russians have bombed so many cities, murdered too many Ukrainian civilians and the civilian infrastructure and they have left behind inhabitable cities where nobody can move back in without years of restoration’s! I apologise if this book review became more about today’s Ukraine rather than about the destiny the mother and her three children underwent during the Nazi occupation, however I feel as if this brilliant author opened up the door for many people to make their own conclusions on what’s going on in our own day and age by telling us her experiences of oppressions degrading behaviour by both countrymen and the Nazisz! I’m immensely impressed and grateful that the author gave us/me this opportunity to write about the geopolitical situation in the world of today. Respectfully, Grace
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