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    Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust
    Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust
    Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust

    By Lila Perl and Marion Blumenthal Lazan

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    About this ebook

    The twentieth-anniversary edition of Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s acclaimed Holocaust memoir features new material by the author, a reading group guide, a map, and additional photographs. “The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what’s said and in what is left out.”—ALA Booklist (starred review)

    Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family—father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert—were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps, including Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, before finally making it to the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.

    Four Perfect Pebbles features forty archival photographs, including several new to this edition, an epilogue, a bibliography, a map, a reading group guide, an index, and a new afterword by the author. First published in 1996, the book was an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and IRA Young Adults’ Choice, and a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and the recipient of many other honors. “A harrowing and often moving account.”—School Library Journal

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 18, 2016
    ISBN9780062475749
    Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust
    Author

    Lila Perl

    Lila Perl is the author of more than 60 books for adults, young adults, and children, all of which have been published by mainstream publishers. They include Dutton, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, and Scholastic. She has won awards for her young adult fiction and biography. What I Did Last Summer is her first Ebook. Lila Perl lives in Beechhurst, New York.

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    Reviews for Four Perfect Pebbles

    4/5

    107 ratings8 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A story of a little girl's survival. She also goes into what life was like after the war.
    • 4/5
      This Holocaust narrative provides one family's experiences during WWII. Written in simple, but compleling, language, the author relates the horrors that she witnessed as her family was sent to the death camps and death trains. Aimed at young readers, the book contains very disturbing pictures which further highlight the author's recollections. However, occassionally the simplicity of the story seems to jump over parts of the history.
    • 5/5
      Heartwrenching! This one is perfect for younger children, it doesn't sugarcoat, but it also doesn't give graphic detail, so kids can think and draw their own conclusions about how horrible the Holocaust was without being too sickened to want to read the story. A wonderful tale of survival and never giving up even when many obstacles are thrown in your path. A tale of family love that will make you appreciate what you have even more!
    • 4/5
      This book was absolutely beautiful, emotional and just amazing!
    • 4/5
      Marion describes her story as the one that Anne Frank might have told had she survived past March 1945. Both Anne and Marion spent time in Westerbork and later Bergen-Belsen. Of the 120,000 Jews detained in Westerbork, 102,000 perished before the end of World War II, 18,000 survived. Anne fell into the former group, Marion, the latter. While Anne’s story is typically read by pre-teens and early teenagers in the world today, Marion’s serves as an introduction for those who are just starting to ask their parents and teachers how people can be so mean and intolerant of one another.

      In a society that is quickly becoming more divided and more intolerant, Marion’s message of hope, faith, and family strength, is even more important than it was when she first started discussing her experiences a couple decades ago. While most may brush off the striking similarities to the current president’s rise to power and the Nazis, it is hard for those who truly know their history to ignore. It is even harder for those who know that atrocities of WWII still ring loud in their older generation’s ears, and yet their younger generations engage in racist and destructive behavior.

      Marion’s story is one of compassion and hope during one of the world’s worst times. My only reason for giving a less than superb rating is that brevity of the book. While written with young children (9-11 years old) in mind, there is only so much that one can remember about those years themselves, particularly 50 years later, as was the case when Marion & Lila wrote Four Perfect Pebbles and Marion recounted her childhood to Lila. Everyone always wants more from a good book, but at 160 pages, Four Perfect Pebbles is incredible concise.
    • 3/5
      Marion was almost five years old when her family fled Germany for Holland. Despite the visas and tickets they had to immigrate to the United States, they were unable to leave Europe once the Germans invaded Holland. They then made arrangements to be part of a group immigrating to Palestine however, they were sent instead to Bergen-Belsen in the “family camp.” The family is able to stay together until her father dies of typhus several months after liberation.

      I found this book a bit lackluster. The story alternates from Marion’s point of view and third person. Such intertwining of narration and first-person voice makes the story a bit bland and unemotional. Overall, this book lacks the intensity of other holocaust books.
    • 4/5
      This is a story of frustrating missed opportunities. This is a story of hope. This is a story of courage.

      Told in simplistic detail, the story contains the Blumenthal family of four who are moved on Hitler's chess board, forward, backward, sideways, down hill, uphill, on trains, in camps, with hope, with little hope, with denial and then with realization that to be stuck in Germany when your life is meaningless to the master holding the rule book equates to a harrowing game that you never agreed to play.

      The author tells the tale of the Blumenthal journey that lasted six and 1/2 terrifying years.

      Trapped in Hitler's Germany, the Blumenthal family were temporarily lucky to flee to Holland, but shortly thereafter that country was not safe. Through a series of unfortunate missed opportunities, they were sent to various refugee camps, and then back to Germany to Bergen Belsen. Six days before the British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, the Blumenthals were transported like cattle to another location. Riding the typhus infested death train for two weeks, eventually they were liberated by Russian troops.

      At the beginning of the Nazi occupation young Marion Blumenthal collected three perfect pebbles, superstitiously she believed if she found the fourth it would be a sign that their four family members would survive. Alas, Marion never found the fourth pebble.
    • 4/5
      In the annals of man's cruelty to man, the Holocaust stands out for its sheer, industrial-scale coldness and horror. There is ample literature attesting to the awfulness of being condemned to death for the mere accident of being born to a Jewish parent. This book, another entry into that corwded segment, is aimed at young readers.

      I don't know that any book about the Holocaust is something I want young readers to read. It's too huge and too vile a topic to make me feel comfortable introducing it to those whose lives are still in the vulnerable and bendable stage. I wouldn't let my child read this book, far better she should read the Marquis de Sade than this kind of material.

      But the world disagrees with me. So I am renewedly glad that I have no young children. But I think this story is one that makes the idea of the Holocaust, its especial and unique evil in human history, more painfully poignantly real than any other literary work I've ever seen: This is the story of a child who went through the system with her family intact, until the bitter horrifying end of the tale. This is what the horrible, vile, evil, disgusting Germans wanted to destroy: A little girl, her mama, her papa, and her big brother.

      Because they were Jews.

    Book preview

    Four Perfect Pebbles - Lila Perl

    Child’s identification card bearing the Nazi coat of arms, issued to Marion Blumenthal, age three and a half, in Hoya, Germany, on June 10, 1938

    DEDICATION

    To Joan Newman, to whom I am deeply grateful for the privilege of having met Marion Blumenthal Lazan.

    —L. P.

    To my mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, who carried the full burden and whose love and perseverance saw us through, and to my husband, Nathaniel, whose deep devotion has made the perpetuation of our heritage possible. And in memory of my father, Walter Blumenthal, who would have derived great joy and fulfillment from his three grandchildren—David, Susan, and Michael—and nine great-grandchildren—Arielle, Joshua, Gavriel, Dahlia, Yoav, Jordan Erica, Hunter, Ian, and Kasey Rose.

    To all those who have known adversity and despair, I offer my belief that out of darkness can come light.

    —M. B. L.

    CONTENTS

    Dedication

    Prologue

    1.   Four Perfect Pebbles

    2.   A Small Town in Germany

    3.   Get Dressed and Come with Us

    Photo Insert

    4.   Escape to Holland

    5.   The Greatest Disappointment

    6.   On the Death Train

    Photo Insert

    7.   Freedom and Sorrow

    8.   Holland Again

    9.   America, at Last

    Epilogue

    Bibliography

    Map: Germany and Surrounding Nations, 2016

    Afterword to Twentieth Anniversary Edition

    Photo Insert

    Praise

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    PROLOGUE

    This is the story of a family—a mother and father and their two young children—who became trapped in Hitler’s Germany. They managed eventually to leave that country for Holland, where they were soon again caught in the Nazis’ web, and their situation grew even more serious. For in the final years of World War II, when the Holocaust reached its most feverish pitch, the four members of the Blumenthal family were returned to Germany.

    During their ordeal, lasting six and a half years, the Blumenthals lived in refugee, transit, and prison camps that included Westerbork in Holland and the notorious concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

    Bergen-Belsen was the camp to which Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were transported in October 1944. The two girls, aged fifteen and nineteen, died there of typhus in March 1945. It was in the very same section of Bergen-Belsen that the Blumenthal family remained imprisoned from February 1944 to April 1945. Marion Blumenthal, the younger of the two children, was nine years old when she arrived there. Her brother, Albert, was eleven.

    The British troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, wrote of its indescribable horrors. Piles of corpses lay unburied everywhere, while those who still breathed were little more than living skeletons. The entire camp population was infested with lice. Those prisoners who had not already succumbed were the dying victims of typhus and other epidemic diseases, starvation, exposure, and neglect.

    The Blumenthals, however, were not among the deeply suffering prisoners who might have benefited from the British capture of Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Six days earlier they had been marched to the camp’s loading platform and placed aboard a train of cattle cars headed east in the direction of the dreaded Auschwitz extermination camp. For two weeks the death train, so named for the many passengers who died of typhus, made its tortuous way across Nazi Germany. When liberation came at last, it was at the hands of Russian troops who had little to offer those who staggered weakly from the train.

    As a grown woman Marion Blumenthal Lazan recalls the events that shaped her youth. She tells of the four years she spent with her family in Holland’s Westerbork, of her terrified arrival in Bergen-Belsen and what it was like to live through the long chain of days behind its barbed-wire fences, and of the struggles of her teenage years of postwar Europe and America.

    Invaluable details and documentation have also been supplied by her mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, and her brother, Albert Blumenthal. The inner strength and enduring spirit of the members of this family make it possible for all of us to become witnesses to an evil that, sadly, must remain forever in human memory.

    CHAPTER 1

    Four Perfect Pebbles

    Long before dawn crept through the windows of the wooden barrack, Marion stirred in Mama’s arms. She had slept this way, wrapped in her mother’s warmth, for many weeks now, ever since her family had arrived at the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany.

    All around her were the sounds of the other women and children, lying in the three-decker bunks that ran the length of the barrack. As Marion came awake, the muffled noises sharpened. There were gasps and moans, rattling coughs, and short, piercing cries. And there was the ever-present stench of unwashed bodies, disease, and death.

    Hardly a morning passed without some of the prisoners no longer able to rise from their thin straw mattresses. When the guards came to round up the women and children for roll call, they stopped briefly to examine the unmoving forms. Later those who had died in the night would be tumbled from their bunks onto crude stretchers, and their bodies taken away to be burned or buried in mass graves. Soon new prisoners would arrive to take their places. As many as six hundred would be crowded into barracks meant to hold a hundred.

    Mama nudged Marion. "Get up, Liebling. It’s time."

    As soon as Mama withdrew her arms, thin as they had become, the warmth vanished, and the chill of the unheated room gripped Marion’s nine-year-old body. Cold and hunger. In her first weeks at Bergen-Belsen, Marion had been unable to decide which was worse. Soon, however, the constant gnawing sensation in her belly began to vanish. Her stomach accustomed itself to the daily ration of a chunk of black bread and a cup of watery turnip soup, and its capacity shrank. But the bitter chill of the long German winter went on and on.

    On one of her earliest days in the camp Marion had actually believed that she saw a wagonload of firewood approaching. Perhaps it would stop in front of the barrack and some logs would be fed into the empty stove that was supposed to heat the entire room, for a few hours of glorious warmth. But she had been horribly mistaken. The wagon trundled past, and a closer look told her that it was filled not with firewood but with the naked, sticklike bodies of dead prisoners.

    As on all winter mornings, getting dressed in the predawn grayness took no time at all. Marion had slept in just about everything she owned. All she had to do was to put her arms through the sleeves of the tattered coat that she had used as an extra covering under the coarse, thin blanket the camp provided.

    Soon the cries of the Kapos (Kameradshaftspolizei, or police aides)—privileged prisoners who served as guards—were heard as they moved from barrack to barrack.

    Zum Appell! Appell! Raus, Juden!

    Marion and Mama must now find a way to relieve themselves before hurrying to the large square, with its watchtower and armed guards, where the daily Appell, or roll call, took place. There was not always time to visit the communal outhouse, about a block away from the barrack. The toilets in the outhouse were simply a long wooden bench with holes in it, suspended over a trench. There was no water to flush away the waste, no toilet paper, and, of course, no privacy.

    Some mornings, Marion and Mama and the other prisoners had to use whatever receptacles they owned as night buckets—even the very mugs or bowls in which they received their daily rations. Before leaving the barrack for Appell, the prisoners had to make sure the room was clean, the floor swept, and their beds made. Each inmate stood in front of her bunk for

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