Claras War by Clara Kramer, Stephen Glantz

This heart-stopping story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis is based on Clara Kramer`s diary of her years surviving in an underground bunker with seventeen other people. Clara Kramer was a typical Polish-Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, Clara`s family was taken in by the Becks, a "Volksdeutsche" (ethnically German) family from their town. Mrs. Beck worked as Clara`s family`s housekeeper. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic, a womanizer, and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Beck sheltered the Kramers and two other Jewish families. Eighteen people in all lived in a bunker dug out of the Becks` basement. Fifteen-year-old Clara kept a diary during the twenty terrifying months she spent in hiding, writing down details of their unpredictable lifexfrom the house`s catching fire to Mr. Beck`s affair with Clara`s neighbor; from the nightly SS drinking sessions in the room above to the small pleasure of a shared Christmas carp. Against all odds, Clara lived to tell her story, and her diary is now part of the permanent col-lection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.