Overview

After sixty years, Kristine Keese is finally able to share the memories of her years spent in the Warsaw Ghetto as a small child. She owes her survival, and that of her young uncle, to the striking resourcefulness of her mother. The story emerges as vividly as if it happened yesterday, full of details that only a child would notice. Although the the events of the Warsaw Ghetto and the fate of its victims has been described many times, Keese's story is exceptional, as it is told through the eyes of, not a victim, but a child engaged with her daily reality focused on survival.

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9781618115096

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A fine honest memoir...devastation is lodged in the accumulated detail, one of the reasons publications such as this are so important. --Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement, February 23 2017

Twelve-year-old Kristine arrived in New York City in 1946. When she tried to tell her story to her new American schoolmates they did not believe her. Seventy years later she tells the story she had thought best to put aside then. With uncanny sobriety and a wondrous memory for visual detail, Kristine Keese narrates her time in the Warsaw Ghetto and later as a hidden child on the so-called Aryan Side. She revisits the eight year-old girl wearing high heels and a kerchief so that she could go to work beside her mother. She writes of her mother's ingenuity, her stepfather's coldness, and the surreal view of brightly-colored flowers from the bridge in the Warsaw Ghetto. Keese's self-reflective attempt to understand what was humanly possible has meaning far beyond the particularities of Germans, Jews and Poles during the Second World War. In her story, told with no melodrama and no self-pity, we see the universal through the particular. --Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University Thousands of miles - and gallons of water - separate a mansion in a little town on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, and a house in Hampstead. Yet they were amazingly linked last week with the publication of a slim paperback called Shadows of Survival ... [Keese] decided that she needed to write her story for the sake of her children's inheritance, for future generations so they would honour the endurance of others. --Gerald Isamann, The Camden Review October 2016 A fine honest memoir...devastation is lodged in the accumulated detail, one of the reasons publications such as this are so important. --Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement, February 23 2017 Kristine Keese survived childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto but when she arrived in New York in 1946 at the age of 12, her new classmates did not believe what she had suffered. Seventy years later, with astounding detail and clarity, she tells her story in Shadows of Survival, a Child's Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto ... Some of her experiences are those of any child -- being so engrossed in her library books that she allows the dinner to burn, for instance. Others are drastically different -- such as walking home from a bread-buying expedition and having the loaf, still in her mother's hand, bitten by a starving child. --The Jewish Chronicle, 13 Jan 2017

Twelve-year-old Kristine arrived in New York City in 1946. When she tried to tell her story to her new American schoolmates they did not believe her. Seventy years later she tells the story she had thought best to put aside then. With neither sentimentality nor cynicism, but rather uncanny sobriety and a wondrous memory for visual detail, Kristine Keese narrates her time in the Warsaw Ghetto and later as a hidden child on the so-called Aryan Side. Calmly, without polemics, she revisits the eight year-old girl wearing high heels and a kerchief so that she could go to work beside her mother. She writes of her mother's ingenuity, her stepfather's coldness, and the surreal view of brightly-colored fl owers from the bridge in the Warsaw Ghetto. Keese's self-refl ective attempt to understand what was humanly possible has meaning far beyond the particularities of Germans, Jews and Poles during the Second World War. In her story, told with no melodrama and no self-pity, we see the universal through the particular. - Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University

Twelve-year-old Kristine arrived in New York City in 1946. When she tried to tell her story to her new American schoolmates they did not believe her. Seventy years later she tells the story she had thought best to put aside then. With neither sentimentality nor cynicism, but rather uncanny sobriety and a wondrous memory for visual detail, Kristine Keese narrates her time in the Warsaw Ghetto and later as a hidden child on the so-called Aryan Side. Calmly, without polemics, she revisits the eight year-old girl wearing high heels and a kerchief so that she could go to work beside her mother. She writes of her mother's ingenuity, her stepfather's coldness, and the surreal view of brightly-colored flowers from the bridge in the Warsaw Ghetto. Keese's self-reflective attempt to understand what was humanly possible has meaning far beyond the particularities of Germans, Jews and Poles during the Second World War. In her story, told with no melodrama and no self-pity, we see the universal through the particular. --Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History Yale University

Author Information

Kristine Keese, born to a middle class Jewish family in Poland, was incarcerated as an eight year old child in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war the family emigrated to New York. Kristine earned a BA in philosophy from Cornell University and an EdD from Harvard School of Education. She worked as a social science researcher and an educator, most recently in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She resigned from academia to live and work on her husband's fishing boat. They fished commercially along the coast of Florida, spent a year in Haiti and later fished in Alaska where she also worked as an educational evaluator for Native American education. She and her husband later owned and operated an organic cranberry bog in Massachusetts. Kristine Keese passed away at the age of 82 in October 2016.

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