The Book of Aron

The Book of Aron, author Jim Shepard points out, on the book's cover, is a novel.  Though at the end when you read through the acknowledgements he does write that he used factual material about Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary; The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak among other sources about living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust.

The Book of Aron is the story of life in Poland as Germany starts its march on Poland and its containment of Jewish citizens into smaller and small ghetto areas that become known as the Warsaw Ghetto.  We start with Aron, also known by family and friends as Sh'maya, narrating the story of his life.  He lives with his family, two older brothers and one younger brother, and his parents in the Polish countryside.  His father gets a job at a fabric factory in Warsaw and the family moves to Zamenhofa Street in the city.  There at the age of eight he makes his first real friend Lutek.  By the time he is ten  the war has started.  Aron and Lutek find that they have a knack for sneaking around unnoticed.  They can bring home some stolen food for their families.  They can sneak out through a hole in the wall, out of the Ghetto, and bring back items to trade for food and other necessities.  He and Lutek meet Boris, Adina and Zofia and become a small gang of bandits, smuggling and trading contraband to help their families survive.

This story describes from Aron's point of view how as life slowly changes, the children and adults living in the Ghetto slowly adapt to the new routines.  You feel like you are there suffering with the sickness, lice and starvation the people are experiencing.  You can understand how Aron feels and reacts to the circumstances of the hand he has been dealt.  As the walls of the Ghetto squeeze in tighter and more and more of the area is quarantined for typhus, Aron is approached by the Jewish Yellow police, who want him to work as an informer.  Aron has to wrestle with his conscience and work to stay alive and one step ahead of the blackmailers, Jewish, Polish and German Police.

Aron ends up in the orphanage, with Dr. Janusz Korczak, his childhood changed forever by the war, "We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it.  If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew.  All anyone could think about was the table's next loaf of bread.  In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds.  We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan.  It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand.  On Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard."

Shepard has written this novel in such a convincing voice that the reader will much more clearly understand the dilemmas and choices people had to make to survive these horrific times.