The book Never to Be Forgotten is written by Beatrice Muchman and is an evocative and moving narration of a Jewish child’s life in Belgium while it was occupied by the Nazis. Beatrice Muchman and her family had come to Belgium from Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. In 1943, when the Nazis began to round up Jews and started sending them to death camps, her parents handed her over to a Catholic woman. Soon her parents were killed and she was brought over to the USA where she was adopted by her uncle and aunt who had managed to escape to America before the outbreak of the war. While growing up, Beatrice developed wrong notions about her parents and their intentions, perhaps because she was too young at that time to have been explained the reasons for her being entrusted to other people for her safety. For several years after she came to the USA, Beatrice was under the belief that her parents had abandoned her and she was always full of anger against them. However, with the occurrence of some fortuitous events whereby she found a collection of letters from her parents along with some related documents amongst the papers that belonged to her uncle, Beatrice, as a fully grown woman, began investigating her past and the circumstances that led her to be sent to America. By brushing through her memories in recollecting past events and by relating to what she had learned from the letters along with the accounts in her diary which she had maintained as a child, Beatrice was able to restructure the details of her childhood years during the Holocaust. Having done this, she fully understood the immense love that her parents had for her and she could feel their pain when they separated from her and sent her away to a safer place fearing for her life.
The story of a young child whose parents had no option but to separate from her to save her from getting into the hands of the Nazis does indeed stir the soul in making anyone experience the intense emotions that must have been experienced by the parents of the girl while they were separating from her. The young girl must have retained the bitterness in her all along with her childhood for having been rendered homeless without any parental care and such feelings had filled her with remorse and anger towards her parents for having handed her over to people in a faraway land. It was a matter of sheer coincidence that upon reaching adulthood, Beatrice came across the letters and documents that stirred in her a desire to trace her past along with the circumstances that made her be separated from her parents and her homeland. The child in her did not make her understand the motives of her parents and it was only after reaching maturity that she could finally learn of the true nature regarding her perception of being abandoned in childhood. The story is very deep-rooted in portraying the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II especially on the Jews, and the child in her must have made her deeply think about why Hitler had been so cruel towards the Jews. The book enables a more moving story when it is known that no country was willing to accept Jewish refugees and applications for the same were rejected on flimsy grounds such as the emigration from being put away on grounds of typographical errors. As Beatrice had noted in her book in this regard that, “a single typographical error, could spell the difference between life and death.” It was for this reason that her family had to go to Belgium which was soon to be in Hitler’s clutches and this was the place where her parents were killed.
References
Beatrice Muchman, Never to be Forgotten: A Young Girl’s Holocaust Memoir, 1997, KTAV Publishing House.