Why I Had to Leave the Ukraine Behind
A Memoir
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Why I Had to Leave the Ukraine Behind
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Narrated by:
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Alex Hyde-White
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By:
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Oscar Felix
About this listen
Oscar Felix (1893-1980) was born in the Ukraine, in the shtetl of Brailov where the only doctor doubled as the town barber. His father died six months before Oscar was born, which left his mother with enough debts that she couldn't afford to buy straw to heat the room. The poverty he describes is unimaginable. Going to bed hungry characterized Oscar's childhood and that of his mom and six siblings. But their Jewish humor kept them going: When does a Jew sing? When he is hungry. But laughter doesn't fill stomachs.
By the age of 20, he had taken the most important decision of his life thanks to a "box" Thomas Edison had invented in a far away land called America. Every Friday evening a wealthy lawyer would put the phonograph on his balcony for the entire shtetl to enjoy. Against all odds, Oscar Felix made it out. After a long and perilous journey, he finally ended up in Santa Monica, California and immediately knew he was home.
Oscar Felix was lucky to escape the Ukraine before every Jew in Brailov, including his own family was buried alive by the Nazis. This is a timeless story. Today there are millions of Oscars out there with the same dream: find freedom and live in peace.
Holocaust/WWII memoirs by seasidepress.org
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Claiming My Place: Coming of Age in the Shadow of the Holocaust
- By: Planaria Price, Helen Reichmann West
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing
- By Nordic Artisan on 07-09-18
By: Planaria Price, and others
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The Happiest Man on Earth
- The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor
- By: Eddie Jaku
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
- Length: 3 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2,215
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,991
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1,989
Born in Leipzig, Germany, into a Jewish family, Eddie Jaku was a teenager when his world was turned upside-down. On November 9, 1938, during the terrifying violence of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, Eddie was beaten by SS thugs, arrested, and sent to a concentration camp with thousands of other Jews across Germany. Every day of the next seven years of his life, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors in Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and finally on a forced death march during the Third Reich’s final days.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Everyone needs to listen to this amazing man
- By Christan Derryberry on 05-12-21
By: Eddie Jaku
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Last Boat Out of Shanghai
- The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution
- By: Helen Zia
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 492
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 414
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 411
The dramatic real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist revolution. Benny must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. Annuo, forced to flee with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the US in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book, poor performance
- By Helpful Buyer on 07-02-19
By: Helen Zia
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Maggie-Now
- A Novel
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
In Brooklyn's unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle of loss, separation, and hope as she forges her own path toward happiness.
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5 out of 5 stars
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no unabridged
- By sally on 08-03-21
By: Betty Smith
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Into the Forest
- A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
- By: Rebecca Frankel
- Narrated by: Natalie Pela
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 289
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 251
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Story5 out of 5 stars 253
In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war, they trekked across the Alps into Italy, where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great story with an added benefit
- By Scottsville Stu on 12-30-21
By: Rebecca Frankel
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Nothing to Envy
- Ordinary Lives in North Korea
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 4,126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,224
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,220
Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The man who wants to be GOD
- By Gohar on 05-08-10
By: Barbara Demick
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Echoes from the Holocaust
- A Memoir
- By: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman
- Narrated by: Susan Marlowe
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 29
The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home.
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4 out of 5 stars
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4.5* - memoir of a survivor
- By Christine Newton on 06-09-17
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999
- The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz
- By: Heather Dune Macadam, Caroline Moorehead - foreword
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 13 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 666
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 606
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Story5 out of 5 stars 603
On March 25, 1942, nearly a thousand young, unmarried Jewish women boarded a train in Poprad, Slovakia. Filled with a sense of adventure and national pride, they left their parents' homes wearing their best clothes and confidently waving good-bye. Believing they were going to work in a factory for a few months, they were eager to report for government service. Instead, the young women - many of them teenagers - were sent to Auschwitz. Their government paid 500 Reich Marks (about $200) apiece for Nazis to take them as slave labor. Of those 999 innocent deportees, only a few survived.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I don’t think you can ever fully understand
- By Shelley on 02-25-20
By: Heather Dune Macadam, and others
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The Long Loneliness
- The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
- By: Dorothy Day
- Narrated by: Nancy Linari
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 86
When Dorothy Day died in 1980, the New York Times eulogized her as “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality...founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and leader for more than 50 years in numerous battles of social justice.” Here, in her own words, this remarkable woman tells of her early life as a young journalist in the crucible of Greenwich Village political and literary thought in the 1920s, and of her momentous conversion to Catholicism that meant the end of a Bohemian lifestyle and common-law marriage.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Required reading for any who work in poverty
- By marguerite allred-crawford on 11-16-20
By: Dorothy Day
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
- My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
- By: Lucette Lagnado
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Story5 out of 5 stars 41
In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
- By Brustar on 06-10-20
By: Lucette Lagnado
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Eat the Buddha
- Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 170
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 168
A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the best-selling author of Nothing to Envy.
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4 out of 5 stars
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TIBET
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 08-24-21
By: Barbara Demick
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West of the West
- Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
- By: Mark Arax
- Narrated by: Mark Arax
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 22
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Story5 out of 5 stars 22
Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West", and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.
By: Mark Arax
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Invisible Jews
- Surviving the Holocaust in Poland
- By: Eddie Bielawski
- Narrated by: Norman Gilligan
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
Eddie Bielawski was born in the town of Wegrow in Poland in mid-1938. Not a propitious time and place for a Jewish child to be born. As a young child, he sees the Nazi army marching toward Russia. Day and night they marched - soldiers, trucks, tanks, and more soldiers, in a never-ending line - an invincible force. One night, his father had a dream. In this dream, he saw what he had to do: where to build the bunker, how to build it, and even its dimensions. This would be their Noah's Ark, saving them from the initial deluge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Surviving not the camps, but being in hiding!
- By Logophile on 04-26-18
By: Eddie Bielawski
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My Name Is Selma
- The Remarkable Memoir of a Jewish Resistance Fighter and Ravensbrück Survivor
- By: Selma van de Perre
- Narrated by: Rachel Bavidge
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 148
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 135
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Story5 out of 5 stars 134
Selma van de Perre was 17 when World War II began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had not been an issue. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several occasions, Selma barely avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. While her father was summoned to a work camp and eventually hospitalized in a Dutch transition camp, her mother and sister went into hiding - until they were betrayed in June 1943 and sent to Auschwitz.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Remarkable
- By slp 4 me on 05-11-21
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 793
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 703
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 701
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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My Friend Anne Frank
- The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds
- By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, Dina Kraft
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 104
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Story5 out of 5 stars 103
In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable pair enjoyed a carefree childhood of games, sleepovers, and treats with the other children in their neighborhood of Rivierenbuurt. But in 1942, Hannah and Anne's lives abruptly changed forever.
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5 out of 5 stars
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the missing piece to Anne’s story and the complete picture of Hannah’s
- By Wilson on 07-13-23
By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, and others