Suitcases & Backpacks: Growing Through the Holocaust

This is a testimony of intricate detail that describes a young girls survival in ghettos and concentration camps between 1942 and 1945. Readers follow her heart-breaking journey from Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auzchwitz to a labour camp near Breslau, followed by the alienation she feels upon returning to Vienna, her subsequent journey to Prague, and finally the realization of her dream to immigrate to Palestine. Chava Kohavi Pines was born Eva Hirsch in 1927 in Vienna, Austria, to a middle-class Jewish family. Since immigrating to Palestine in 1946, the author has resided in Kibbutz Dorot in the northern Negev where she worked as a teacher and counsellor for years. Only with forty years’ distance from the trauma of her youth has she been able to write an account of some of her experiences under Hitler.