Email
PrintBook review: "Through Eva's Eyes"
A new children’s book tells the story of one of Tulsa’s only Holocaust survivors.
Eva Unterman is one of only two Holocaust concentration camp survivors in Tulsa. She is determined to retell her memory of Nazi genocide over and over and over — a warning for future generations.
Her 17-year-old granddaughter, Phoebe Eloise Unterman, listened, learned and adopted her grandmother’s mission by writing and illustrating a children’s book titled “Through Eva’s Eyes” (Landmark House, 2009). Landmark chose Phoebe’s book to be one of a select few in its Publisher’s Choice Gold Award line.
Eva Unterman was liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp at age 12, about the same age as Phoebe was when she first started to write “Through Eva’s Eyes.”
In contrast, Eva, then a young mother, kept her horrific ordeal a secret from her two children.
“When I moved here, I wanted my children to grow up all-American kids without the burden of such evil,” she says. “Thirty years ago I explained my very personal history for the first time to classroom students. We, who witnessed the Holocaust, including American GIs, buried those memories after World War II. Now that we are older, there is an urgency to describe and caution.”
She and others in the Council for Holocaust Education of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, for which she serves as chair, work closely with teachers to help plan lessons, suggest readings, organize student exhibits and provide guest speakers.
At 7 p.m. on May 6, the council will sponsor an Interfaith Holocaust Commemoration at Temple Israel. The council has done so annually for the past 13 years. “Captive Melodies: Musical Voices from the Holocaust” will honor the artists who were lost with a concert led by Barry Epperley, of Tulsa Community College’s Signature Symphony, and a symbolic candle lighting. The featured speaker is Robert Elias, executive director of the OREL Foundation, which aims to rediscover 20th century musical treasures that were suppressed by the Nazis.
Phoebe, who lives in Kansas City, seconds her grandmother’s urgency. “Never again” is an ideal.
“Situations similar to my grandma’s are happening right now,” she says.
“Through Eva’s Eyes” is suitable for fifth-graders and up. Phoebe gently tells the brutal tale. One poignant episode recounts when the “black boots” ordered all Jews to leave the Lodz ghetto: “We could take only what we could carry and Mother told me I could take one doll.” Little Eva had to make a big decision.
We readers, too, must remember the inhumanity and make a decision, the biggest of our lives.
