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Return to Book Page. These shattering stories describe the lives of ordinary people as they are compelled to do the unimaginable. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 26, Paul Bryant rated it really liked it Shelves: These bitter glimpses of the Holocaust in Poland ring like small folorn bells tolling us all to hell.

I'll give you one example. In "The Key Game" there's a couple and their three year old boy. They finish dinner, it's late, 10 at night, but before the boy goes to bed he has to play the Key Game. They have been playing it every night for two weeks and the boy still hasn't got it right. The problem is not the boy, it's the father who just isn't quick enough. The mother calls out These bitter glimpses of the Holocaust in Poland ring like small folorn bells tolling us all to hell.

The mother calls out "Ding dong! That's all she has to do. The boy jumps up and runs to the door. And then, "Just a minute, I have to find the keys. He pulls out drawers, slams doors and yells "Just a minute, I can't find them, I don't know where Mummy put them! In a minute or so, the father reappears from the bathroom.

He says "I still need more time, he has to look for them longer.


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I slip in sideways And he's got to stamp his feet louder. You know that if someone should ring the doorbell one day when Mummy is at work, everything will depend on you?

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Skrawek Czasu) | theranchhands.com

And what do you say when they ask where your parents are? View all 3 comments. A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Jan 03, Jaksen rated it it was amazing. A series of short stories based on actual events, that is, the event gave rise to the story, but the author, Ida Fink, never names names.

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories

She wanted to preserve the privacy of these individuals. However, when I first asked him Powerful book. However, when I first asked him 'what he did' during the war, he said he served ice cream to German POWS in a prison camp. Later he had a story about killing one of the royal swans in London to eat because he was tired of K-rations. He had no idea all the swans in England belong to the ruling king or queen.

Or he was an MP and patrolled streets in some little European town or city. He sugar-coated what he did, where he was posted, what he saw. But when the TV series 'Holocaust' was aired, he told my younger sister a few things including this: I didn't want to read any more Holocaust books. Then I saw this slim volume and changed my mind. Of course Holocaust literature is almost always very powerful, harrowing, poignant, terrifying.

The stories in this volume are all that and more. Most are very short and feature people at the end of their lives - or their wife's life, their parents, their small children. But who saw these events? Who lived to tell the truth that became these stories? In most cases, non-Jewish Poles, though some were witnessed by Jews who survived. Could the owner have done something to save the young woman? Or a man and his wife and their young daughter walking to the town center, a place in many Polish towns where hundreds - thousands - of Jews met their death.

They know what they are walking toward; they have no choice. A last-second opportunity is given to save their child - do they take it? Stories of people in hiding, lying in cramped quarters for days on end to the point they can barely walk when at last they emerge. Or the story of a young woman, a survivor, who meets an American near the end of the war.

He professes to love her but wants her to keep her 'Ayran,' or 'non-Jewish-sounding name' a secret. He's a rescuer - why does he want her to conceal who she really is? The story of a young man, who when ordered to bring his elderly teacher to the town center, has to lie to entice her there. How does he go on after that? And there's the fairly well-known story of a little boy, who when he hears a certain knock on the door, has been trained to forestall those on the other side of the door by rushing about, looking for the key to the door. He needs to do this long enough in order to give his father time to hide.

To know these all originated in real events - and to also realize that there are hundreds of thousand of other stories we will never know - is absolutely heart-breaking. Five stars, nothing else. Jan 25, Terri Lynn rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book is stunning.

It is a slim volume of short stories set in Poland during the Holocaust and are slices of that experience that the author and others shared. They are not long stories and were finely written and unusual.

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They don't come out in your face and say "Holocaust in Poland" but break your heart nonetheless with people knowing what is coming and facing it such as a family with a preschooler who is prepared to answer the door to Nazis and give his dad time to hide, telling the Nazis This book is stunning. They don't come out in your face and say "Holocaust in Poland" but break your heart nonetheless with people knowing what is coming and facing it such as a family with a preschooler who is prepared to answer the door to Nazis and give his dad time to hide, telling the Nazis that his daddy is dead, and an old woman who ran off two young Jewish lovers from her garden only for them to be slaughtered by Nazi guns.

If you are like me and can't bear to read about bad things happening to dogs, don't read the Dog story. This is a very fine thought-provoking collection of stories. I wept over them. Jan 06, Antof9 rated it liked it Shelves: Wow -- this book was very heavy. Of course, I expected that, but oh! Maybe because it covered so many scenarios? Each of them painful.

A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (Skrawek Czasu)

I read the first half or so in one sitting and then took a break to read another book. Came back and finished it, and then thought a lot about my review. It's hard to just write a short "review" of the book, isn't it? These were real people. It was good to take a breath between each chapter. I think we must read things like this, no matter h Wow -- this book was very heavy.

I think we must read things like this, no matter how difficult or upsetting. As Agafia says in "Behind the Hedge", "We have to know about it. And look at it. But when she saw the name of the title in Polish, she said the name hadn't been changed at all -- in Polish, that's exactly what it means -- A Scrap of Time. Read this so you know Sep 12, Ana' rated it it was amazing. Moments captured and revealed I discovered this beautiful novel through a Holocaust online class I took through coursera. I learned so much and my knowledge on Holocaust literature has expanded enormously.

This was the last novel assigned in the course, and now that I have read it, I can understand why.

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This is a compilation of short stories related to the Holocaust capturing specific moments. Through the series of fictional stories, the author cl Title Review: Through the series of fictional stories, the author clearly presents different circumstances during the Holocaust: Each individual story represents a specific moment. It is so well described that one becomes one more spectator in the story.

One feels the tragedy, the panic, the desperation. It is as if the story became a bubble that the author blew air into for us to see, to be part of it and to understand how each event was experienced by these characters.

The novel deals with the issue of the Holocaust: It mainly focused on the Polish Jews. One ought to present the Holocaust "in a very authentic manner," she says. This is not to say that she has not used fantasy to make a point, as in the stunningly surrealistic ending to "The Garden That Floated Away. A Jewish doctor "on a warm and peaceful afternoon" in summer, negotiates secretly within the confines of his home office for forged documents that might possibly protect his family.

The young narrator sits on the porch steps overlooking two gardens—really the single garden her family has long shared with their non-Jewish friends and neighbors. There is no fence, for they had long ago companionably agreed it "would be an intrusion. But now, as the narrator overhears their muffled conversation, she realizes that fence or no fence, they are divided: The trees on their "Jewish" side are all bare; the family has already eaten the fruit, even when it was green.

The neighbors are saying that "we were right to do so, because who knows what would happen to us by winter. It is Fink's repeated and brilliant use of this device that helps to account for the intensity, economy, and power of her stories. Fink's stories are arranged chronologically within the time frame of the Holocaust years in Poland, beginning with early harassment of Jews to ultimate deportations, disappearances, and death.

She never takes us into the world of the camps: Later we move into the post-Holocaust period when grief-stricken survivors are obsessively trying to locate their loved ones or at least find out what happened to them. Those who know the worst may nonetheless be driven obsessively to talk about them, even though there are those—like the young girl in "Splinter"—who literally fall asleep when her young boyfriend insists on repeating yet again an account of how his mother, arrested by the Nazis, managed to spirit him away to safety.

Essentially two themes—time and memory—run through this masterful collection; both are introduced in the title story "A Scrap of Time.