Sometimes, the story of a memoir’s publication is almost as interesting as the life it recounts. Russian immigrant Nonna Bannister (1926-2004) lived happily with her American husband for decades before finally telling him about her sufferings during the Holocaust, where she was a forced laborer for the Germans. Throughout the war she carried with her a pillow in which she had sewn her photographs, documents, and the diary she kept in several different languages. Now, more than six decades later, the diary is finally available to the public, and it’s one of those books that just about everyone should read.
The first chapters of the memoir depict an idyllic-sounding childhood in Russia and Ukraine. Born into a privileged family in 1926, Nonna heard stories of how her Cossack grandfather had been butchered by the Bolsheviks, and how her grandmother had saved the family by fleeing to another part of the country. As a child in an increasingly repressive Stalinist state, Nonna suffered somewhat because her father was Polish, but for the most part escaped the brutality around her. Nonna had a magical childhood with loving parents, family servants (rare for the period), interesting family friends (including the Solzhenitsyns), and a formidable but doting babushka who had the whole extended family in for summer and winter holidays at a 37-room country house. She steeped the grandchildren in the liturgies of the Orthodox Church long after it was safe to do so. This was a religious heritage that Nonna would cling to during the cruel years to come.
After war broke out in 1939, everything was in chaos for the family. In an effort to protect Nonna’s older brother, her parents sent him away to school—a separation that turned out to be permanent, as he was never heard from again. Other relatives fled to stay ahead of the Germans, also with tragic results. Because of this, Nonna’s parents made the decision to stay put and try to live out the Nazi occupation of Russia and Ukraine. I won’t give all the details away (though the chapter titles do), but this also turned out to be a disastrous decision, and through a variety of events Nonna and her mother were transported to Germany to serve in labor camps. Two unforgettable scenes involve events that occurred on the train into Germany. In the second, Nonna barely escaped with her life, and the horror of the mass execution she witnessed will remain with the reader long after closing the book.
This is not a perfect memoir. There are too many Editor’s Notes, which give the diaries a jerky feel and distract from the story. But readers will come away with a profound admiration for Nonna’s indomitable will to survive and her determination to forgive and to find the good in humanity.
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