The Girl Who Sang: A Holocaust Memoir of Hope and Survival - Estelle Nadel with Bethany Strout - ★★★.¾

AUTHOR: Estelle Nadel with Bethany Strout

ILLUSTRATOR: Sammy Savos

GENRE: Graphical Memoir

PUBLICATION DATE: January 23, 2024

RATING: 3.75 stars.

In a Nutshell: An upper-middle-grade graphic memoir recounting a Polish-Jewish girl’s experiences during the WWII Holocaust. Excellent presentation of the characters and their struggles. Mixed feelings about the art. Intense scenes, not surprising given the theme. Not for sensitive children.

Enia Feld, who later becomes ‘Estelle Nadel’, was born to a large Jewish family in a small Polish village named Borek. The youngest of five, with the closest sibling being seven years older than her, Enia is the baby of the family. She loves to spend her days singing in the fields, playing with her siblings, and helping her mother in whatever little ways she can. All this changes when the Nazis invade Poland in 1939. Over the next five years, five-year-old Enia goes from the girl who sang at every opportunity to the silenced child in hiding, living on the generosity of her Gentile neighbours. Is the end of the war enough to bring back normalcy when you have lost almost everyone and everything dear to you, when the values of those you knew and trusted changed because of political machinations? This memoir highlights both these points well.

The book begins with a portrait gallery of all the key characters. This is very helpful for a quick reference while reading the main content.

While there are many graphic memoirs and autobiographies about Jewish experiences during the Holocaust, a majority of them try to keep a balance between their personal narrative and broader political and historical content. In that sense, this book is slightly different, mainly because Enia was very young when her life was upturned. The focus in the book is restricted to what she experienced personally or what she heard from those around her.

Thanks to this approach, the story is faithful to its writer’s memories, but also somewhat lacking in terms of general information about the Holocaust. It would help to have some awareness of the history of that period to understand Enia’s experiences better.

The writing is never overly dramatic, even when the scenes are shocking. There is a certain subtlety to its storytelling. A part of this is because the book is written in Enia’s first-person perspective, so we see the events from a child’s innocent eyes. This doesn’t take away anything from the power of the narrative. It is still painful and upsetting to read.

Given that the tagline calls this a ‘story of hope and survival’ and that the memoir is written in flashback from Enia’s future life as Estelle, we obviously know that she is going to survive. But the hows and whens are still interesting to read.

The whole story is divided into sections based on years. It not only creates natural chapters in the story but also helps readers prepare for what’s next. I love that the story didn’t condense Enia’s pre-war story. It shows a beautiful picture of her family and the happy, busy life she had with them. The portrayal of Jewish traditions and procedures in the first section was amazing, making it feel like a genuine look at a Jewish family rather than one only in name. There are translations provided in footnotes wherever needed.

The title has a nice significance. I love how it depicted Enia’s passion for singing, her silenced voice during the war years, and the return of the song in her heart after freedom. The phrase ‘the day the music died’ from ‘American Pie’ feels like it would apply to this memoir as well.

It’s great that the book doesn’t stop with the end of the war but also depicts the struggles of the displaced in that tricky post-war period where they were free and yet constrained by their situation. It was somewhat strange to see Israel mentioned as a place of refuge, but it is historically accurate, so…

The epilogue is a little half-baked; I wish there had been more to that scene.

The parting note, on the other hand, were fabulous. It offers an insight about the fate of every single key character of the memoir. This is a great idea because there were many wonderful people in Enia’s life, and leaving their outcomes out of this book would have made it incomplete. There are also some actual photos at the end.

The illustrations left me with slightly mixed feelings. The graphics are really good, but they are also somewhat kiddish. This might be somewhat justified given that Enia was very young then. But her experiences weren’t that of a typical child. I wish there had been a bit more realism and maturity to the art. In its current style, most young adults and adults would dismiss it as a kids’ story.

Recommended to young adults and adults interested in reading a graphical Holocaust memoir.