What an amazing story! This was yet another one that just sucked me in and would not release its hold on me until I’d finished it.

An absolutely amazing story of survival, Rena’s Promise speaks of Rena Kornreich, a young Polish Jew who is on the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz. Soon thereafter, her sister shows up as well, and Rena keeps the promise to her mother that she will “watch over the baby.”

Throughout the book, Rena holds nothing back. She speaks of all the horrors she saw during those three or so years she spent in camp. This has been the most frank book I’ve read so far describing camp life and their lack of all things we take for granted, and the reality of death every day.

How often do you think about the food you eat? They had next to none. Jewish prisoners were only given 300-something calories to eat a day. If they were lucky and Germany was doing well at war, they might have gotten a single bite of pork to eat.

What about the hair on your head? Every three weeks they were shaved… all over their bodies. The women were humiliated each time as they had to stand naked all day before each other, the SS, and their fellow men, prisoners who were forced to do the shaving. And yet, the lice and bed bugs continued to bite and make life miserable.

There was no getting a good night’s sleep on the wooden planks the camp-builders called beds. Room for two was filled by man, many more people.

What even about the toilet paper? How often do we take this seemingly small thing for granted? In the camps, they had nothing.

There was, oh, so much more, camp life was literally hell on earth.

Death was everywhere. Those who were brought in and selected for the gas chambers, she even speaks of seeing hundreds of children at one time, clutching toys, walking in lines, as they headed to the gas chambers. People who ran for the electric fences, certain they would not survive the selections the next day. Someone who died in the night and was ice cold by morning. Young girls with their skulls crushed into the mud by an SS boot for some minor infraction such as lifting one’s nose to get a precious breath when all faces were told to be in the mud. Stragglers on the Death March who were shot simply because they were a little bit slower than everyone else.

And even when not faced with death directly… she finds and admires a fur coat in “Canada” (where all the items stolen from the victims were sorted, cleaned, etc., and sent back to Germany to be worn by members of the “Aryan race”) only to see the tag and realize she’s holding her aunt’s coat. She lasted at that job a day, she would have rather worked out doing hard manual labor in the fields.

Yes, Rena and her sister Danka both survived. They survived cattle car train rides, Auschwitz, Birkenau (Auschwitz II), the death march, more cattle car rides, Ravensbruck, and another fourth camp. It is only by the grace of God and the help of each other and other people, such as Polish soldiers who only wanted to have a conversation with a Polish woman, that they survived. People who argued over food and tried to hoard everything for themselves did not survive. It was not so much the will for oneself to live, but teamwork and the true care and responsibility for someone else’s life.

There is so much I could say about this book – so many passages I could quote, but it would be too much. Instead, read this book for yourself, you will not be sorry you did. Learn, and tell your children, let’s not let this happen again.