Paula's Window: Papa, the Bielski Partisans, and A Life Unexpected

“Paula's Window: Papa, the Bielski Partisans, and A Life Unexpected” is the gripping Holocaust memoir of a Jewish girl’s waking nightmare in a world gone mad and hope regained in the ashes. Artist Paula Burger’s carefree childhood in Novogrudek, Poland, exploded when the Nazis occupied the town in July of 1941. Paula and her family evaded the round ups and executions of thousands of Jews until 1942, when they were discovered by the Germans and forced inside the ghetto, a holding pen of death. Her father eventually escaped and joined the Bielski Partisans in the Naliboki Forest, where he planned to bring his family. One of their neighbors got wind of his activities and informed on him to the Nazis. Unable to locate Paula’s father, the Nazis took her mother away and interrogated her at official headquarters. She told them her husband had disappeared, and denied having children. The Nazis arrested her. Six weeks later, on Yom Kippur, 1942, she was killed. Paula never had a chance to say goodbye. As soon as Paula’s father learned of his wife’s fate, he realized his daughter and son were next. He arranged to smuggle them out of the ghetto and brought them to their new home with the Bielski Partisans in the Naliboki Forest. But no one was safe, especially the children. One night Paula overheard the awful truth: If anything ever happened to her father, his children were expendable. “I loved my father more than life,” Paula writes. “And I knew, one way or another, my life ended with his. Ever since I heard people talking about my brother and me around the campfire, I carried this secret like a bullet in my soul . . . The Bielskis could not risk the lives of hundreds of Jews to save two children.” “After Mama was killed, I wanted to give up,” she writes. “When Papa disappeared for weeks in the forest, I willed myself to die. I guess death didn’t want me. Like the snowflakes of my childhood, we swirl, struggle, collapse — but as long as we breathe, we are commanded to live.” “Paula’s Window, ” written by Paula Burger and Andrea Jacobs, is a haunting chronicle of crushing inhumanity and the tenacity of human love. After reading this book, you will never forget what must be remembered.

Paula Burger is a world renowned artist. She is known for her brilliantly colored abstract menorahs, which evoke the concept of vanquishing the dark. Andrea Jacobs is the award-winning senior writer at the Intermountain Jewish News in Denver.