Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years Hardback - 1997

In 1940, when Misha was seven years old, her mother and father were taken by the Nazis, and she was hidden in a "safe" home they had secretly arranged for her. Realizing the terrible danger she was in, her kindly foster Grandfather taught her survival skills, such as "Don't trust people; they can hurt you", and "You can do anything you make up your mind to do". When Misha overheard her stepmother planning to turn her over to the Germans, the child took off on foot to search for her parents. Hiding in the forests to avoid human contact, she survived by stealing from farm kitchens along the way and pilfering crops in the fields. Often she was near starvation and many times nearly froze to death. In the course of her travels she was befriended by wolves, and among them she experienced the happiest moments of her troubled childhood. "I never remember being hungry in the company of wolves", she writes.

Throughout her trials Misha continued to believe she would find her parents, and so she kept walking, day after day, year after year, across war-ravaged Europe, witnessing firsthand the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. Before the war ended she would be captured by partisans, imprisoned in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, forced to kill a Nazi soldier in self-defense and swept up by her first love. Although she never found her parents, she was reunited with her foster Grandfather when she returned home five years after her journey began.

This astonishing story, full of passion, terror, and triumph, will become a classicin the way that The Diary of Anne Frank is, with the difference that in this tale the heroine survives.