The Holocaust story is one we've all heard more times than we can count. "Thanks To My Mother" is another Holocaust story, but with a few things that aren't included in most other survivor stories. Most Holocaust stories are practically identical at the middle, and very similar at the beginning, and the endings are only somewhat different. Therefore I'm going to focus on the things that I had not encountered in these stories before and let you fill in the blanks about what else happened.
The major difference I encountered was that this story was told by a girl, previous stories had led me to believe that all the women, especially the children of elderly, were killed upon arrival at concentration camps. This apparently was not the case here, this girl and her mother must have went to a camp that used women for labor as well as men, provided they were strong enough. Through the ingenuity of her mother the storyteller was able to pass for a healthy adult and avoid the gas chambers.
The next new thing was the sea trip to a different camp. The death marches were nothing new to me, but this was the first time I encountered one of those marches involving being shipped over sea back to Germany. The conditions on the boat were, as to be expected from things of the Holocaust, terrible.
Aside from those things the story was just another retelling of the horrors of the Holocaust, a topic of which nothing can be said that hasn't been said a million times before by historians.
I'm not sure what else I can say about this book, so I'll wrap things up now and hopefully a comment will provide some inspiration.
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