Out of the Shadows

Out of the Shadows: The Legacy of Two Holocaust Survivors are two books in a single binder-a compelling dual memoir by Piri Piroska Mendelovitz Bodnar (Shadows) and Zoltan Bodnar, who met and fell in love in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany following World War II. In 1944, before that glorious spring of 1945 when the future held renewal, they were teenage apprentices, Zoltan to a barber and Piri to a furrier in Miskolc, Hungary. In that year, the Nazis invaded their country forcing its Jews into ghettos, labor brigades and death camps. Despite forced labor, near starvation and transports from labor camps to death camps, each was determined to survive, even when they were certain that survival was not possible. Zoltan with his brother and Piri with her sister, strove to live for each other or die together in the surreal world in which they were entrapped. We have in these two memoirs arresting tales of loving families, riveting episodes of unprecedented cruelty, daring escape, and death-defying acts in order to sustain life. In Zoltan's memoir are dream-like sequences in which he returns to his childhood, a means for escape from his ordeal. "Piri's Story" is sprinkle with poetry she has written over the years. Her poems punctuate her ordeal and reveal faith in God, a life of religious devotion and a love of nature. There are terrifying experiences here. But there is also a message of hope and remembrance: of those who perished in the Holocaust, the righteous Christians who risked their lives to aid oppressed Jews, and those people around the globe today who are the victims of intolerance. "We must never forget," the Bodnars tell us. For hate in its extreme can take us to the very abyss of inhumanity.