Short interviews with orphan charges at the Bellevue home for displaced Jewish orphans funded by French and American Jewish charities (run by Lena Kuechler, another Boder interviewee) grant us something like a child's eye view of the Holocaust.

Nathan Schacht was no more than twelve when he ran away from a deportation in his home town of L'viv and went to work for a peasant. In 1943 he joined a Russian partisan unit operating nearby and worked as a scout. When his unit was trapped between the advancing Red Army and the Germans in summer 1944, Nathan was severely wounded by an exploding mine. Two years later he still carried the scars, and part of one ear was missing. Lena Kuechler found him in a children's home in Kraków and took him to Zakopane, and thence to France.

From FRESH WOUNDS: EARLY NARRATIVES OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVAL by Donald L. Niewyk. Copyright (c) 1998 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu