Seamstress

From its opening pages

in which she recounts her own premature birth, triggered by terrifying rumors of an incipient pogrom, Bernstein's tale is clearly not a typical memoir of the Holocaust. She was born into a large family in rural Romania—and grew up feisty and willing to fight back physically against anti-Semitism from other schoolchildren.

She defied her father’s orders to turn down a scholarship that took her to Bucharest, and got herself expelled from that school when she responded to a priest/teacher’s vicious diatribe against the Jews by hurling a bottle of ink at him. After a series of incidents that ranged from dramatic escapes to a year in a forced labor detachment, Sara ended up in Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp, and managed to survive—she tells this story with style and power.

—Kirkus Reviews