Such Good Girls

Sophie Turner Zaretsky survived the Holocaust without even knowing she was Jewish, while her terrified, widowed mother worked for a Nazi in Poland as a "Christian" bookkeeper. Flora Hogman, orphaned by the Final Solution, was shuttled through southern France, from convents to the homes of one Christian family after another, clueless about her real identity. Carla Lessing and her family hid upstairs in the apartment of a defiant Dutch barber who protected them for more than two years while cutting German soldiers' hair on the first floor.Sophie, Flora, and Carla survived not only the Holocaust?among the mere 10 percent of European Jewish children who did?but their own survival as well. In Such Good Girls, Rosen traces their lives from traumatic childhood to triumphant adulthood, following each of them to New York City, where they slowly emerged from the devastation of their early years to devote their careers to helping others. It was there, in 1991, that they played important roles in the groundbreaking event that, for the first time, brought together hidden child survivors scattered around the world.A chance meeting with Sophie sent author R. D. Rosen on a journey to grasp the scope of Nazi extermination of Europe's Jews and to honor hidden children, the very last generation of survivors to have witnessed the Holocaust firsthand.