Carved in Stone: Holocaust Years, a Boy's Tale

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

Manny Drukier spent his teenage years trying to survive the Nazi
invasion of his native Poland. Only 11 at the time of the occupation of
Lodz, Drukier spent the next six years in hiding, in ghettos, in work
camps and concentration camps. He, his mother, and his sister survived;
his father did not. In 1991 Drukier returned to Poland for the first
time since the war. There he visited the locations that had been
indelibly etched, as if “carved in stone,” in his memory for half a
century. He found a country with few remaining Jews, but still rife with
anti-Semitism.

This simply told and affecting autobiography chronicles Drukier’s
childhood, his wartime experiences, and his life in North America (he
settled in Toronto in 1948). What gives the book a special place in the
field of Holocaust literature is the author’s ability to convey
simultaneously the ordinariness of everyday experiences (adolescent
romantic longings, for example) and the extraordinary backdrop against
which they unfolded.