Hope Fulfilled After the Horrors of War

Sue Corbett - Miami Herald

Two years ago, Miami author Laurie Friedman read an item in The Miami Herald about Herman and Roma Rosenblat, a Miami couple with a unique how-they-met story. She wanted to know more.

"There were five or six Herman Rosenblats in the telephone book. I called until I found the right one," Friedman recalls.

The result of that phone call, and many subsequent meetings with the Rosenblats, is an astonishing picture book, "Angel Girl," written by Friedman, and illustrated by Ofra Amit, a popular Israeli illustrator making her U.S. debut (Carolrhoda, $16.95, ages 7 and up.) Astonishing because this is a picture book set in a concentration camp. Astonishing because the hero is a child, and the ending is transcendentally happy.

It's also true.

In spare, declarative sentences, Friedman explains the grimly familiar outlines of Herman Rosenblat's childhood in Poland -- how Nazi soldiers herded his family onto two trains -- women and children to the right, men to the left. Though he was only 11, Herman's mother insisted he go with the men, a decision that saved his life. His mother's train departed for Treblinka, where she was killed along with thousands of others. He was sent to a Nazi labor camp.

Amit's haunting artwork shows the camp's wraithlike population, hunger emaciating them. Herman, not yet a teen, looks like an old man. When he dreams, it's of his mother who whispers that an angel is coming to help him.

It's this starving boy who is glimpsed through the barbed wire by Roma Radziki, who lives on a farm nearby. Roma is a hero of this story, an 8-year-old with outsize bravery. She makes eye contact with Herman and, on impulse, tosses him an apple. At great personal risk, she returns every day to do the same. The two never speak -- "One wrong move meant death. My death. Her death," Friedman writes in Herman's voice. Roma wants nothing in return. It's just pure kindness.

The war ends. Herman emigrates to America. A friend arranges a blind date. "Angel Girl" ends, a decade after the war ended and a continent away, with the mindboggling, chance reunion on a New York boardwalk of Herman and Roma. No barbed wire between them now. They have been married since 1958.

Friedman, who grew up in Arkansas, was drawn to the romance, but never would have thought of writing a picture book about the Holocaust if not for the fact that she had experienced an attempt at historical revisionism first-hand.

"I can remember, growing up in the South, someone saying to me, `You know the Holocaust never happened.' That has always stuck in my head," she said. "So it's important to educate young people about this, and this is a pretty safe way because of the happy ending."

She also saw a wider lesson in Herman's story.

"I hope what kids will take away from this is that, even if the darkness in your life is on a much smaller level -- a divorce or an illness -- it's important to never give up hope," she said. 'You have to keep telling yourself, `I have the strength inside me to do whatever I have to to survive.'"

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