Beautifully told in her mesmerizing style, Jennifer Rosner introduces us to four characters who suffered through the war and beyond.

We meet Ana and Oskar whose mother had to give her children to a Polish family who would raise them as their own to keep them safe.

The children had a wonderful life of learning and love but a life that heart-wrenchingly changed after the war.

Where will Ana and Oskar end up?

We meet Roger who grew up in a convent to be kept safe, who was very inquisitive, a clever, witty writer of stories and jokes, and sadly had no parents to go home with on holidays.

We find out what happens to him and where he goes.

We meet Renata as an adult who is a scientist in Israel at an archeological dig. We learn of Israel’s beauty as Renata takes side trips to Tel Aviv and other places.

On her shopping trip she finds a hand-chiseled chessboard and an ornately carved set of nesting boxes.

Could the craftsman in the shop be none other than Oskar whose uncle taught him to whittle and make beautiful shapes out of wood?

I will dearly miss the characters…especially Oskar….he was my favorite.

It also was fun to see our favorite violinist again from THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS.

Another beautiful, beautiful but heartbreaking-to-the-core read based on true events.

ONCE WE WERE HOME does have some happy stories tucked inside as well, along with comments you will ponder, and thoughts about life’s worries and lessons.

Historical fiction fans will devour this marvelously written, impeccably researched read where Ms. Rosner introduces readers to a little known program organized after the war for displaced children.

Ms. Rosner’s writing is exquisite. 5/5

The book was given to me by the author for an honest review.

Once We Were Home, Jennifer Rossner, author, Gabra Zackman, Vikas Adam, narrators
To speak of the Holocaust without acknowledging the horrors of the times, during the reign of Germany’s Hitler, would be impossible. This novel is the story of that time and the Jewish children orphaned, abandoned or relinquished to others, for their own protection and safe-keeping in the hopes that they would survive the most barbaric of times. Sometimes friends, sometimes strangers, sometimes religious organizations and the Church, sometimes The Kindertransport rescued the children. Although there were efforts to save the children, give them new identities and names, and protect them so that they might live and hopefully reunite with their families, few survived the war. At the very least, the hope was that these hidden children would be well taken care of until the war’s end when they could come out of hiding, but many of those rescued would grow up without any knowledge of their real families, their real identities or their real background and religions. Many would be returned, against their will, to families they did not know or had forgotten, many would later be sent to Israel for their safety and a return to their heritage, with or without a family there with whom to be reunited.
This story is made so much more poignant by the Matryoshka dolls/boxes theme that reappears frequently. Matryoshka dolls nest one inside each other from large to small, and in the book, a mother is referred to as a nest for children as she carries the smallest version of herself in the same way the Matryoshka dolls live inside each other, mothers with child. This novel honestly and with great detail, illustrates the trauma of identity, its loss and rediscovery, the origins of loss and grief beyond one’s control, the themes of despair and hope in a world of turmoil.
There are four main stories in this book. One is about Mira and Daniel (Ana and Oskar), just aged 3 and 7, who are secreted away to a gentile, farm family in Poland where they are raised as Catholics. Roger, also a young child who is hidden in a Church orphanage in France, is raised outside of his religion. Renata, protected by her mother who hid their true names and identities, is working on an archaeological dig in Israel and finds her unknown identity to be a source of anguish, and an anthropomorphic nesting doll that is used to reveal the secrets needed to enlighten the reader about the hidden pasts of all of the characters, their unknown histories that are impossible to retrieve or difficult to accept. As their stories relate to each other and unfold, the importance of their religion fades, and the identity they needed to survive becomes more and more relevant.
The book raises many questions. For instance, there is the question of whether or not the children should have been taken from those who cared for them during the war and came to love them, there is the question of whether the religion of the person matters as much as the character of the person. Is the person the same or different depending on the identity they are assigned, or do they remain the same regardless of what they are called, Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Yossi, Daniel, Rami, Roger, Stasia or Ana? Who is the real parent, the one who births the child or raises the child? Are those that “contain” the children more important or is the “container” less important than the guardian? Is the religion one is born with or the one taught, without regard to heritage, more important? The book examines how one’s opinion can change about a person because of arbitrary facts about their background, although they may be irrelevant in the present time, so that with Roger, he finds he is not sure he can love Renata as a gentile German as he thought he could love her as a non-Jewish child who survived the war in a place of refuge from the Germans.
All of the characters have to deal with the perception of relationships, religious affiliation, their own identity and place in the world. They will have to deal with what is really important to them, going forward, the ugly history of the past or the present moment with the possibility of a brilliant future. They will have to deal with the concepts of forgiveness vs. culpability, courage vs cowardice, the past vs what might come to pass as time goes on, family ties vs substitute family. Another recurrent theme is the ability of one’s beliefs having to change because of stories and facts they once believed morphing into quite different realities when hidden pasts are revealed. Names are changed, religious backgrounds discovered, lost relatives sometimes found. As one story exists inside another and grows outward, the author uses the missing matryoshka doll, rolling around in a drawer, to symbolize the families and missing children who are lost, or finally reunited, or reborn in Eretz Yisrael, after the war.
Although the righteous gentile families and efforts of the Church, with its positive and negative behavior is covered, along with the behavior of the organizations dedicated to reclaiming the Jewish children, I believe it was the one point in the novel that I would have liked to have more detail. I have looked up the names and conduct of the organizations intent on finding the Jewish children that survived, and the intent to conceal the identity of the Jewish children by some citizens who had grown attached to them and by the Church that believed they had saved them from sin. I have included links to more detailed information below.
The novel is sometimes melodramatic by necessity because of the subject matter, and often lyrical in the narrator’s presentation which helped to make the novel so much more meaningful as the stories were revealed as monologues meant to enlighten and inform the reader about the characters. Each represents a theme, Renata whose real identity is questioned, Oskar who likes to invent stories, a reality for those who were ultimately saved, Ana who ignores part of her past to her own shame. The children’s behavior was so much better than their years, as if the danger of the times was imbued in their souls. Although the horror of the times is revealed, it is done without shocking the reader to the point of no return. It is palatable, though the stories feel palpable. At some point, the secrets were necessary, but the results often meant the stories remained impossible to tell fully. That is the legacy of the Holocaust. Generations of Jews and their history and their gifts to society were lost. This book shines a light on the effects of the Holocaust and its long-term tragedies that extend into the future and the lives of the children of the victims.
The author could not have known, at the time of her writing, that Jews would once again be smeared and attacked by those who hated them. However, on October 7th, 2023, in Israel, tragically, many Jews tried to go into hiding again, unprepared for the hate to follow. They were unsuccessful. More than a thousand were raped, tortured, murdered and captured as hostages, because they were Jewish, because they were living in a place others wanted to claim.
As I wrote above, here are the links that elaborate further on the effort to save the Jews who survived the Holocaust. The effort was called the Bericha Movement. Bericha means Escape.
https://www.yadvashem.org/education/educational-materials/lesson-plans/bericha.html
https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206388.pdf
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hidden-children-of-the-holocaust
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hidden-children-daily-life
https://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/my-name-is/
https://yated.com/lost-children-of-the-holocaust/