File:1946 Asscher.jpg

1946

Dutch ed. (1946)

German ed. (1961)

English ed. (1986)

Clara Asscher-Pinkhof. Sterrekinderen <Dutch> ('s Gravenhage, H.P. Leopolds Uitgevers Maatschappij N.V., 1946).

Translations

Star Children, English trans. by Terese Edelstein and Inez Smidt (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986).

Also translated into German (1961), Hebrew (1963), Slovenian (1970).

Abstract

A semi-autobiographical novel, based on her experience as a teacher during the Holocaust.

"A fictionalized account of the experiences of Dutch children during the Holocaust in the Netherlands and in Bergen-Belsen. The first two parts of the book (pp. 1-104) were written during 1941-43 in the ghetto of Amsterdam, where Asscher-Pinkhof (b. 1896) taught in special schools for Jews and volunteered to help in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater converted into a detention center for Jews. The manuscript was entrusted to the publisher in 1943, before the expected deportation, with a promise to finish it if she would survive. Asscher-Pinkhof was deported to Westerbork, where she continued her work with children. In July In July 1944, while interned in Bergen-Belsen, she was included in a group released in exchange for Germans from Palestine. She resumed her writing in Palestine in 1944, and dispatched the last chapters in 1945, as promised ... Clara Asscher- Pinkhof had a dream in 1943: "Star Children. The children with the Jewish star. They went past me, the star children that I had known and knew in the critical times in the city and in the theater which was their prison. The dead children and the living. I knew at that moment that I had to be their voice-that I had to speak out and say what they had felt and suffered!' In these sixty-eight short stories, she is indeed their voice. In Amsterdam, Star City, there is Star House, the detention center in which the children and their elders are herded. Westerbork, the transit camp to which they are shipped, becomes Star Desert and, at the end of the railway line, Star Hell-Bergen- Belsen. It is in this world of death and despair that the star children make their way. At the end, there are only a handful left to tear off their stars, from among "crowds of star children who did not live long and happily, whose stars were torn off by God himself and placed among the other stars in the heavens, as eternal evidence!' ... Though the stories and their narrator are the author's creation, the book explores a new kind of realism in Holocaust literature ... Rendered into English from the original Dutch, these brief stories are told from the point of view of the children who are their narrators. through their innocent eyes the reader sees the events that occurred in Amsterdam, Westerbork and finally, Bergen-Belsen, where some 105,000 dutch jews perished during the holocaust. grade: 07-09."--Publisher description.

About the Author

Clara Asscher-Pinkhof (Netherlands, Israel, 1896-1984) was a prominent orthodox Jewish writer, who had a huge readership in her day. She was born in Amsterdam, the daughter of a doctor, and became a schoolteacher. In 1918 she published her first book, a collection of Jewish children’s songs. In 1940 she worked as a teacher in Amsterdam. Arrested in 1943, she was sent to Bergen Belsen, and from there to Palestine in 1944 as part of an exchange for German nationals interned there by the British mandatory government. After returning for a while in the Netherlands, she settled in Israel. She died in Haifa.