Day After Night

I seem to be on a World War Two reading trend lately and this is why I totally enjoyed Anita Diamant's historical fiction Day After Night.  This is a story about a group of young women who find themselves imprisoned in a displaced person's camp in Palestine AFTER they survived the horrors of the concentration camp or life in Nazi occupied countries.  From feeling ashamed of the numbers tattooed on their arms to handling the symptoms of their post traumatic stress disorder to being ashamed to ask for treatment for the sexually transmitted diseases they suffered as a result of assaults, this isn't a sad story.  This is a story about friendship, about female strength, and about hope. The author also wrote The Red Tent which is another story about Hebrew women.  This was an interesting story for me because it talks about what happened after Hitler committed suicide and after the war ended.  Anti-Semitic feelings did not magically dissipate at the end of the war.  Jewish people who survived were not welcomed with open arms everywhere they wanted to go.  At the time Palestine was controlled by the British who weren't all that excited by a huge influx of people who they considered to be "illegal."  This book is one of those stories that follows me around in my head long after I put it down.