A Holocaust Survival Story

Categories: History , Nonfiction , Children's Books

The Secret of Priest's Grotto is a fascinating and unique story of Holocaust survival.  A small group of Jews attempts to outwit the Nazis by hiding in a vast network of horizontal Gypsum caves beneath the western Ukrainian countryside. The challenge facing the Jews is twofold.  They must avoid capture by the Nazis and their allies, and they must also survive the cold, dark, and damp underground conditions of the caves.  As the authors point out, the survivors of Priest’s Grotto hold the unofficial world record for time spent underground—they lived there for almost a year!  The story of how they accomplish this amazing feat makes for a dramatic tale, to say the least.

Though nonfiction, Priest's Grotto is very readable.  The many photos, historical and new, of the interior of the caves, the survivors, and the artifacts they left behind, give the story a lot of visual appeal. It is one thing to read about people who lived in a cave, but quite another thing to actually see the small, dark spaces they inhabited.  The book is catalogued as “teen” nonfiction, but I would easily recommend it for pre-teens who are studying the Holocaust.  (There are no gruesome photos and, amazingly, everyone survives the ordeal.)

For more information about Priest’s Grotto, check out author Christos Nicola’s website.  If you or your child want to learn more about the Jewish experience during WWII, also try Hana's Suitcase by Karen Levine and Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy.  Hana’s Suitcase is an excellent nonfiction account of the Holocaust, in which the life story of young Hana Brady is discovered after her suitcase turns up at a Japanese Holocaust education center.  Yellow Star is a gripping novel based on the life of the author’s grandmother, who was one of the few child survivors of the Lodz ghetto in Poland.