Star Children (English and Dutch Edition)

Clara Asscher- Pinkhof had a dream in 1943: "Star Children. The children with the Jewish star. They went past me, the star children that I had known and knew in the critical times in the city and in the theater which was their prison. The dead children and the living. I knew at that moment that I had to be their voice-that I had to speak out and say what they had felt and suffered!' In these sixty-eight short stories, she is indeed their voice.

In Amsterdam, Star City, there is Star House, the detention center in
which the children and their elders are herded. Westerbork, the transit
camp to which they are shipped, becomes Star Desert and, at the end
of the railway line, Star Hell-Bergen- Belsen. It is in this world of death and despair that the star children make their way. At the end, there are only a handful left to tear off their stars, from among "crowds of star children who did not live long and happily, whose stars were torn off by God himself and placed among the other stars in the heavens, as eternal evidence!'

Though the stories and their narrator are the author's creation, the book explores a new kind of realism in Holocaust literature.