Syvia Perlmutter was four-and-a-half years old when World War II broke out. For 50 years, she did not talk about her experiences in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. When her recollections began to emerge in dreams and memories, she told her niece, Jennifer Roy, about them, who collated these memories into a novel in verse from Syvia’s first-person perspective.

As a Jewish American, Roy knew that the Holocaust was a shocking and tragic event that they should never forget, but she also struggled to understand it, as none of her relatives ever wanted to talk about it—including her father, who narrowly escaped both the Black Forest Massacre (where his own father was murdered) and the extermination camps. Through Syvia’s memories, Roy feels connected to the lived experience of her relatives in the Holocaust.

On May 1, 1940, 160,000 Jewish people who lived in the Polish city of Lodz were forcibly relocated into a ghetto, which was enclosed with a barbed-wire fence.

“How It Begins”

Syvia’s father unexpectedly comes home from work. Syvia brushes her doll’s hair and listens to her parents and aunts discussing the need to leave Lodz, which is now unsafe for Jewish people.