Hands of War: A Tale of Endurance and Hope, from a Survivor of the Holocaust - Hardcover

Ingram, Marione

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1620871858 ISBN 13: 9781620871850

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor.  This is her story.
As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. Marione’s mother attempted suicide after receiving a deportation notice—Marione revived her, but then the bombs started to fall, as the Allies leveled the city in eight straight days of bombings. Somehow Marione and her mother and sister survived the devastating firestorms—more than 40,000 perished, and almost the same numbered were wounded.

Marione and her family miraculously escaped and sought shelter with a contact in the countryside who grudgingly agreed to house them in a shed for more than a year. With the war drawing to a close, they went west, back to Hamburg.  There they encountered Allied troops, who reinstalled the local government (made up of ex-Nazis) in order to keep order in the country. Life took on the air of what it used to be. Jews were still second-class citizens.

Marione eventually took shelter at a children’s home in a mansion once owned by wealthy Jewish bankers. There she met Uri, a troubled orphan and another one of the “Children of Blankenese.” Uri’s story, a bleak tale of life in the concentration camps, explores a different side of the Nazi terror in Germany.

In this stirring account of World War II through the eyes of a child, the author’s eloquent narrative elicits compassion from readers. 

About this title

About the Author

Marione Ingram is a writer, artist, and civil rights activist who survived the Holocaust, the fire-bombing of Hamburg, Germany, and the incendiary efforts of Mississippi’s Ku Klux Klan. She immigrated to the United States and, having experienced racial discrimination in Europe, became engaged in the civil rights movement. Excerpts of her work have been published in The Best American Essays of 2007 anthology, Granta, and Women Writers: A Zine. 

Reviews

The Allied bombing of Hamburg saved Ingram’s family from their imminent deportation to the death camps. The anti-Fascists also saved them, and so did the vicious local anti-Semitism: denied access to the shelters (“for Aryans only”), Ingram was unharmed when the shelters were bombed, and thousands of civilians were killed in the firestorm. With such bitter irony, there is no slick relativism about the Holocaust in this stirring memoir, but the personal viewpoint confronts the history seldom told, including the horror of tens of thousands of German women and children slaughtered by the Allied firebombing. And Ingram is candid about the shocking postwar anti-Semitism (“Genocide succeeded and attitude remained”) and about prejudice in the West. Her triumph is that finally in the U.S., she moved—unlike many survivors—beyond victim identity to activism in the civil rights movement, where she was passionate about nonviolent resistance to racism. With lots of full-page photos of the Hamburg firebombing, this important historical account is bound to spark discussion. Pair it with accounts of the firebombing of Dresden. --Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1620871858
• ISBN 13: 9781620871850
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224