Aufwachsen in bedrohlichen Zeiten. Growing up in Threatening Times

The memoirs of Hanna Shay, née Herzberg, bring to life the experiences and perspectives of a privileged young Jewish girl growing up during Nazi dictatorship. While her grandparents were rooted in the Jewish faith, her parents were committed socialists and pacifists. With the Nazi seizure of power, the entire family from Erfurt was forced to an uncertain odyssey across Europe.
Hanna describes her experiences from their internment in the Westerbork transit camp, to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz, where Hanna’s father was murdered, and then to various other camps to perform slave labor. She reports in detail the gradually increasing deprivations faced by Hanna and her family, the conditions in the camps, and the “reawakening” to post-war conditions after her liberation from Mauthausen in Austria on May 5, 1945. Hanna, her sister, and their mother all later moved to California, where Hanna died in 2003.
Her family is now sharing the memoirs she wrote in 1989 for her descendants with the public, supplemented by an afterword by her children, family photos, supporting documents, illustrations, and historical analyses.