Little House on Mount Carmel

Alexandre (Alex) Blumstein was born and raised in the city of Grodno, eastern Poland, where Poland, Lithuania, Soviet Byelorussia and Hitler’s Third Reich all converged. It was a beautiful land but also a country in which Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Byelorussians had lived uneasily side-by-side for many centuries. This memoir is written from the perspective of a Jewish boy between the ages of seven and 17. Alex was born in 1930 into a family of prosperous secular Jews, and raised by his German Lutheran nanny. In 1939 Poland was partitioned and Grodno became part of the Soviet Union. Soviet rule was quickly succeeded by German invasion and the brutal repression of the Jewish population. Although Alex was wounded during the invasion, his father refused to believe that organized genocide by one of Europe’s most cultured nations was possible. However, after his arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo, he arranged for his family to esape from the ghetto.