Your Name is Renée: Ruth's Story As A Hidden Child The Wartime Experiences of Ruth Kapp Hartz

In Nazi-occupied France in 1941, four-year-old Ruth Kapp learns that it is dangerous to use her own name. "Remember," her older cousin Jeannette warns her, "your name is Renee and you are French!"
A deeply personal book, this true story recounts the chilling experiences of a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust. The Kapp family flees one home after another, helped by simple, ordinary people from the French countryside who risk their lives to protect them. Eventually the family is forced to separate, and young Ruth survives the war in an orphanage where she is not allowed to see or even mention her parents. Without the trappings of lofty language or the faceless perspective of history, this first-person account poignantly recreates the terror of war seen through the eyes of an innocent child. Your Name Is Renee is a tale of suffering and redemption, fear and hope, which is bound to stir even the most hardened heart.

German-Jewish four-year-old Ruth Kapp went to the south of France with her mother in 1940 while her father was in the Foreign Legion. They ended up in several different hiding situations during the war, helped by local townspeople. Descriptions of episodes such as roundups of Jews and obtaining false identification are terrifying in both their simplicity and their child's-eye view. Eventually Ruth, renamed Renee and commanded to speak only French, was spirited away to a convent orphanage. There she was instructed to pretend that her parents were dead, and she began to wonder whether it was actually true. The account of postwar occurrences--including open anti-Semitism by the French and the discovery that many of her relatives had perished in camps--has an appropriately surreal feeling. Freelance writer Cretzmeyer relates Kapp's story in the first person from Kapp's point of view, and she evokes the changeable world from a child's perspective in a clear voice. Family photographs add personal flavor, just as historical appendices on the Nazi occupation of France and the French Resistance, lend a helpful frame to this touching narrative.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.