Claiming My Place: Coming of Age in the Shadow of the Holocaust

by Planaria Price, Helen Reichmann West

Overview

A Junior Library Guild selection

Claiming My Place is the true story of a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Nazi Germany and hiding in plain sight.

Meet Barbara Reichmann, once known as Gucia Gomolinska: smart, determined, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. A Jew growing up in predominantly Catholic Poland during the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future. Her world is turned upside down when Nazis invade Poland and establish the first Jewish ghetto of World War II in her town of Piotrko´w Trybunalski.

As the war escalates, Gucia and her family, friends, and neighbors suffer starvation, disease, and worse. She knows her blond hair and fair skin give her an advantage, and eventually she faces a harrowing choice: risk either the uncertain horrors of deportation to a concentration camp, or certain death if she is caught resisting. She decides to hide her identity as a Jew and adopts the gentile name Danuta Barbara Tanska. Barbara, nicknamed Basia, leaves behind everything and everyone she has ever known in order to claim a new life for herself.

Writing in the first person, author Planaria Price and Helen Reichmann West, Barbara's daughter, bring the immediacy of Barbara’s voice to this true account of a young woman whose unlikely survival hinges upon the same determination and defiant spirit already evident in the six-year-old girl we meet as this story begins.

The final portion of this narrative, written by Helen, completes Barbara’s journey from her immigration to America until her natural, timely death.

Includes maps and photographs

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578392103
Publisher:	Aliyah Press
Publication date:	07/03/2023
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Planaria Price has published six textbooks with McGraw-Hill and University of Michigan Press. She met the then-90-year-old Barbara Reichmann in 2006, interviewed her at length, and conducted extensive historical and social research in order to write Claiming My Place.

Dr. Helen Reichmann West is a psychotherapist in private practice. Prior to collaborating on this biography of her mother, Helen has published academic articles, essays, book reviews, and poems in professional and literary journals. She lives with her husband, Carl Frank, in Washington, DC, and Key West, Florida.

Editorial Reviews

01/22/2018
Price’s rendering of West’s mother’s early life reads like suspenseful historical fiction, telling a rarely heard side of the Jewish experience during WWII. Barbara Reichmann, born Sura Gitla “Gucia” Gomolinska in 1916, described to Rice, in sensory detail, her prewar Jewish childhood in a town in central Poland, followed by the tense war years living in Poland, Germany, and Switzerland as a Polish-Catholic girl named Basia. Reichman’s education, fluency in Polish, and fair hair and coloring allowed her to pass as a non-Jew while many of her friends and family suffered through or died during the Holocaust. Writing from an engrossing first-person perspective, Price makes Gucia/Basia a fully dimensional character, tracing her development from taking her heritage and faith for granted to becoming a leader in the youth Zionist movement at age 13. She left the organization at 18, realized that she might survive the war by hiding her identity. Family, friendships, and romance give poignancy to this unique coming-of-age story, which is further enhanced by maps, photos, a glossary, and an afterword. Ages 12–up. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Price has boldly elected to tell the story in Basia’s own first-person, present-tense voice. The result is a dramatic, suspenseful account of survival in extremis, told in collaboration with Basia’s American daughter.” —Booklist

“Price's rendering of West’s mother’s early life reads like suspenseful historical fiction, telling a rarely heard side of the Jewish experience during WWII . . . Family, friendships, and romance give poignancy to this unique coming-of-age story, which is further enhanced by maps, a glossary, and an afterword.” —Publishers Weekly

“A rich exploration of a Holocaust survivor’s sheltered childhood, the atrocity that failed to destroy her, and her later life as an immigrant.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Told in a present tense, first-person narrative, this true story was written based on extensive interviews . . . Thanks to the detailed memories and the conversational tone, this book provides an engaging and informative reading experience with as much appeal as a fiction title. Recommended.” —School Library Journal

“A searing personal account full of unforgettable details, as well as broader questions about the ultimate meaning of her experience . . . offers an excellent opportunity to discuss the ways in which we reconstruct and remember the past.” —The Jewish Book Council

“I was completely engrossed by this drama of survival. Barbara Reichmann's story is quite extraordinary. It is sad, and terrible, and yet somehow captivating. The whole story of those who survived the Shoah by passing as Christians and working in Nazi Germany is an often forgotten part of the historical record.” —Kai Bird, Executive Director, Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY Graduate Center, and co-author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“As occurs with The Diary of Anne Frank, this book merges the dire circumstances of the Holocaust with the tenuousness of being a teenager. But Claiming My Place expands the view provided in the diary for one critical reason. Anne Frank’s story is told within an isolated cocoon. In Barbara’s story, however, the Holocaust is in full view as her experiences unfold.” —David H. Lindquist, Ph.D., IPFW College of Education and Public Policy / Regional Museum Educator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

“This frightening true story of a young Jewish girl's flight from the deadly grip of the Nazis celebrates the surprising ingenuity and raw courage found only in the depths of the human spirit. Risking what few others dared, Barbara Reichmann, née Gucia Gomolinska, speaks with wisdom and uncommon self-awareness through her detailed, colorful, and evocative recollections from earliest childhood. In the final portion of this book, her daughter, Helen West, continues Barbara’s journey in an insightful and loving overview of Barbara’s life from the family’s arrival in New Orleans in 1951 until her death in 2007. This is a great read with the suspenseful, inspiring and uplifting appeal of a novel, about a character who will capture the reader’s heart.” —Allan Holzman, Peabody and Emmy Award-winning director and editor (Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Holocaust, Old Man River, The Native Americans)

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2018
Gr 7 Up—During her childhood in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, Gucia Gomolinska had access to a good education, and she actively participated in a Zionist youth group. All of that changed in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. After losing her mother to typhoid and seeing many family members, friends, and neighbors murdered by German soldiers, Gomolinska realized that her survival depended upon hiding her identity. Under the name Danuta Barbara Tanska, Basia for short, she moved away and found work in Polish and German towns that were safer because they were supposedly Judenrein, "cleansed of Jews." Told in a present tense, first-person narrative, this true story was written based on extensive interviews with Basia. The account describes how she survived the war and also tells the stories of family and friends, such as Heniek, her longtime boyfriend, and Sabina, her companion and roommate. Basia's determination and strength of character is skillfully emphasized. An episode from her early childhood hints at this for readers (she refused to wait a year to start school after her father forgot to register her). VERDICT Thanks to the detailed memories and the conversational tone, this book provides an engaging and informative reading experience with as much appeal as a fiction title. Recommended for most YA nonfiction collections.—Magdalena Teske, West Chicago Public Library District

School Library Journal

Ilyana Kadushin ably narrates this biography of Barbara Reichmann, a young Jewish woman in Poland at the onset of WWII. Kadushin’s voice expresses sadness, anger, and frustration at the increasing discrimination and violence of the Nazis. As fear for her own safety grows, Barbara comes to believe that her Aryan appearance provides her the best chance of safety. Her idea is to hide in plain sight in Germany. Even though the listener knows that Barbara survives, the suspense in the story is palpable, and the losses she suffers are devastating. Helen Reichmann West, the author's daughter, delivers an afterword in pleasant tones that inform listeners about Barbara’s life and family after the Holocaust. E.J.F. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

2018-02-05
The true story of a Jewish teenager who survived the Holocaust by passing as a Christian Pole.Gucia Gomolinska was raised in a loving family in a Jewish neighborhood of Piotrków Trybunalski, in central Poland. When the Nazis came, blonde Gucia, then in her 20s, was able to escape the ghetto before its liquidation by changing her name to Barbara and obtaining false papers identifying her as Polish. Post-war, she reunited with the few miraculously surviving members of her family, married, and had a daughter. Upon realizing that they couldn't return to Poland—surviving Polish Jews were sometimes massacred in pogroms—the young family settled in the United States with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Told in the first person, this biography was based on interviews with both Barbara and her daughter, Helen. Loving depictions of pre-war Piotrków are filled with realistic touches that make its lost past palpable: teachers Barbara adored or disliked, interactions between the myriad youth groups, her early interest in politics, and her questions about religion. In an afterword by Helen we learn of Barbara's disgust in witnessing racial hatred in the form of segregation after her arrival in the United States.A rich exploration of a Holocaust survivor's sheltered childhood, the atrocity that failed to destroy her, and her later life as an immigrant. (photographs, afterword, glossary) (Biography. 12-15)

Kirkus Reviews