Hana
Ratings4
Average rating4.5
It's 1954 and nine-year-old Mira's life is about to change forever. After a typhoid outbreak rages through her town, robbing her of her parents and siblings, the orphaned child is forced to live with her mysterious, depressive Aunt Hana, a figure both frightening and fragile. Gradually, Mira uncovers the secrets of their troubled family history and begins to understand why her aunt is so incapable of trusting herself and the world around her. Deftly weaving two separate timelines, the harrowing reasons behind Hana's reclusive way of life, the guilt she wears as palpably as a cloak, and the tattoo on her wrist, are revealed to Mira.
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A multi-generational family story showing the impact of WWII on Jews in then-Czechoslovakia. We meet Mira, a little nine year-old rebel who loses her family due to a typhus epidemic, and then needs make a new home with her quiet, strange aunt Hana, who is a living shadow of the atrocities of the past. We then travel back in time and learn how the previous generations acknowledged the neighbor country's warning bells too last. How can you leave a place that has been your home for your whole life? Living peacefully alongside others, never suspecting they could turn on you? Eventually Hana's path leads to the Theresienstadt camp and eventually Auschwitz.
Intermingled family fates, love stories, and one of the darkest histories there is.
