The Secret Holocaust Diaries

Nonna Bannister must have seemed like a pretty normal wife and mom when she was busy raising her kids in the 1960’s. She was attractive, had a good sense of humor, was devoted to her husband and children, and was active in her church.

She was also a holocaust survivor, though she chose not to tell anyone.

Nonna was born into an old, aristocratic Russian family with strong ties to the Motherland. Her grandfather had been a member of Tsar Nicholas II’s Imperial Guard Staff, had been personally honored by the Tsar himself, and was assigned to protect the Tsar and his family during the days leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. His widow had to hide all this carefully after he was killed by the Bolsheviks. As a child, Nonna used to go with her mother to the Solzhenitsyn home where they enjoyed spending time with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s mother, Taissia.

Nonna and her family were initially optimistic about their prospects when Germany invaded Russia during World War II. Nonna’s father came from one of the wealthiest families in Warsaw, Poland, and he was confident that his fluent German and foreign contacts would help him get his family out of Russia safely.

All this changed when he was beaten to death by a group of Nazi invaders; Nonna and her mother spent the next several years in Nazi-run prison camps, and Nonna’s mother was eventually incinerated at Ravensbruck.

Nonna began keeping a diary when she was a little girl, and she kept up this diary throughout the war. When she finally escaped to America, she locked her diaries in a trunk, along with many photographs and other documents she collected during her time as a prisoner of the Nazis. She married soon after she reached the United States and for four decades told no one any of what she had witnessed and lost during the holocaust.

Nonna finally shared her diaries and memories with her family for the first time in the 1990’s. These diaries have now been published for anyone to read – Nonna Bannister’s book, The Secret Holocaust Diaries, is available here. (Thank you to Tyndale for providing me with a review copy.) It offers a unique view of the holocaust through the eyes of a remarkable girl (Nonna was a teenager when the war began) whose solid Christian faith and rigorous classical education served her very well indeed during those difficult years.

I expected this book to be filled with difficult stories of the horror Nonna saw during the war. There were certainly some stories like that, but they pale in comparison to Nonna’s expressions of compassion and forgiveness for those who tore her family apart. This book is a powerful reminder of the ways in which love triumphs over hate. It’s also a testament to the usefulness of a good classical education; Nonna’s ability to think well about the events she experienced seems to have been instrumental in her survival of and recovery from them. Also, on a more practical level, she was fluent in six different languages as a child, and her impressive language skills served her well when she was a prisoner. I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this book – and let me know what you think of it.