Naidia Woolf

Reverie Naidia Woolf

In her memoir Naidia Woolf looks back at her early childhood in England, for her the carefree days before the Second World War; at the week-end before war was declared on Germany when, at aged five, she, and over a million other children, were evacuated to the countryside for safe-keeping; at the war years, with its air raids and government-issued home shelters, and the food rationing, some of which lasted into the 1950s. She also recalls the first time she experienced antisemitism - as an evacuee in Wales. In one poignant chapter, Naidia writes with an adult understanding and deep feeling about her parents' tumultuous marriage and mother's emotional instability. In the sobering epilogue, she describes going to Poland in 2007 to visit her ancestral sites. In the center section of the Treblinka death camp, she sees a group of stone slabs, engraved with the names of the towns from which the Jews who perished at the camp were deported. One of the slabs memorializes the town where her maternal grandparents once lived.