A first-person account of hiding in a bunker during the Nazi
occupation of Poland Clara’s War: One Girl’s Story of Survival.
By Clara Kramer. With Stephen Glantz. Harper/Ecco, 339 pp.,
$25.99. By Janice Harayda Clara Kramer tells us early in this
book that when Nazis arrested Jewish leaders in her town in
Poland in 1941, her mother donated “her wedding band” to help
ransom them. More than 150 pages later, she says that her family
had to pay a monthly fee to the Christians who were hiding them
in a bunker, and when her parents ran out of money in 1944, her
mother gave “her wedding ring”: “We didn’t sell it until now.”
This first quote comes from the story told in Clara’s War with
the aid of screenwriter Stephen Glantz. The second comes from
one of its excerpts from the teenage diary said to have inspired
the narrative. The inconsistency between the two quotes – one of
a number involving substantive facts – shows a problem with this
book: Its publisher bills it as a “biography,” but it reads more
like a noveliz