Behind the Secret Window; A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood During World War Two

New York: Dial Books, 1993. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiii, [1], 161, [1] pages. Frontis illustration. Illustrations (many in color). After hiding with her mother in the apartment of Polish Catholics during World War II, Dr. Toll went on to spend the rest of her life writing, teaching, and speaking about the Holocaust. Toll spent more than a year when she was a girl with her mother in the tiny space in Poland after they failed to escape the Nazi invasion. Her father, brother, and other relatives had disappeared — presumably murdered — and she spent her hours in hiding in 1943-44 by writing stories, and passages in her diary, and painting more than 65 watercolor pictures. Her paintings imagined what it would have been like to attend school, have playmates, and visit the countryside. As a child in Poland during the Second World War, the author began to keep notes from the day the Germans entered Lwo'w, her birthplace, in 1941. Two years later, when her mother and the author were hidden from the Nazis by a Christian couple who risked their lives to save theirs, she invented her own code that she called her "Esperanto," her universal language, and converted such dangerous words as "ghetto" and ''Jews" into it. She reasoned that, if the Gestapo ever found her writing, they would not realize that she was Jewish and thus would not destroy it. Nelly produced twenty nine paintings which tell the story of a lovable, imaginative child beset with terrifying uncertainties, and of the courageous mother who nurtured her daughter's unswerving belief in brighter days ahead. Later, her diary was adapted into a play that was produced at several venues, and her art, to which she added for the rest of her life, was displayed around the world, including at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Behind the Secret Window won a 1994 International Reading Association's Book Award, and a New York Times book review called it an "important and deeply moving document." Derived from a Kirkus review: In Toll's remembrance, art equals hope: her happy family pictures, painted in the secret room where she and her mother hid from the Nazis and the Poles, show extraordinary preteen talent (some of the 29 powerfully evocative paintings reproduced here now hang in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel) as well as the will to survive. Nelly's plight—going from bonbons served on silver platters to hiding behind false walls—was not atypical. In some ways reminiscent of Maus, this emotionally complex and informative memoir reports the willingness of some neighbors to turn in Jews for a bag of potatoes and a bottle of vodka. Adults are keenly observed: a tutor nearly becomes a sex offender; the paranoid man who hides Nelly is both horrifying and funny. The poignancy is heightened by evocative language (``minutes walked by with small steps'') and raw emotional hunger (``waiting, waiting for Papa''), and by the postwar rush to reconstitute families by swift remarriages—not seen in many Holocaust books, but an important aspect of healing.