The Secret Holocaust Diaries: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister

 This is not the Christian version of the Diary of Ann Frank. Before the reader of this review becomes defensive, let me assure you that I am horrified by the holocaust. I believe that all the horrors including the horrors mentioned in this book happened. They may not have happened exactly at the places or on the dates Nonnie mentions in her diary, but I believe that substantively they happened as described. This book badly needs editing. Further, these diaries, documents, and notes should have been given to an expert author and not a Christian book author as was done here. I understand why the editors were conflicted. This is a diary that spans perhaps 20 years and includes the notes and entries of a very young girl. Some of the recorded "facts" were incorrectly recalled and in some cases the correct version may not have been an accurate description of the author's life experience. Instead of a messy and definitely imperfect work of non-fiction, an expert author could have written a fictionalized version based heavily on Nonnie's diary entries and memories. Further, almost everyone who survived the holocaust finds some distant Jewish relative to claim. Perhaps, Nonnie's father had a Jewish grandfather in his background, but I doubt he was Jewish. Spoken Yiddish and German are very closely related. Yiddish is a dialect of German. They are written differently. Yiddish is written with the Hebrew alphabet and German is written with an alphabet similar to the English version

. Had her father's family done extensive business in Poland, it is likely that they did business with Jews. Before the holocaust there were 2 million Jews living in Poland, many of them in business. They may have learned Yiddish so that they could do business with them. However, I also suspect that Nonnie's father had at least one Jewish relative other than a mother or father. Feodosija, Nonnie's beloved grandmother idolized the Cossacks. Her husband was one and she wanted her son to be one as well. It was the Cossacks that raided the Jewish Shtetyls raping, burning, looting and murdering Jews. They are the soldiers that chase the Jews out of their village in Fiddler On The roof. So idolizing them without seeing them in reality and context was indeed a fantasy. It is true that Nonnie and her mother suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis. However, until Anna was sent to Ravensbruck, what she suffered was nothing compared to what the Jews suffered. Nonnie never suffered the privations the Jews suffered. They lived far longer. The typical lifespan for a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp if the inmate was not killed immediately and could work was 6 months. Nonnie and Anna lived for years in German custody. Few if any nuns concealed Jews as German orphans in hospital settings with hospital food reserved for Germans. Nonnie's children should consider hiring a novelist to turn her diaries and documents into a novel based on fact but in part fictional and labelled as fiction. Television shows called docudramas serve this function in film. We don't have a similar venue in literature.

Do not be fooled by all the strong reviews. Most of them were written by Christians who are persuaded to do so by her frequent mention of her faith in God and Christ to pull her through. Certainly her faith helped her survive. Christians will call this book a testament to the human spirit. They will call it a testament to faith in God and our savior, Christ. If those kinds of books do not interest you, you might skip this book. If you are a student of the holocaust, this book gives insight into how the Nazis treated Russian labor volunteers and Poles. However, there must be better choices out there. Further, this book will suffer on the kindle. There are many photos and documents that enrich the book and should be seen in print. This book should sell for far less than its current price. Nonnie wanted the world to know of the Nazi horrors she experienced so they would never happen again. The estate should look upon this as a donation to society and not hope to earn anything more than the expenses of publishing it. It is not a professional effort though it pretends to be one. The poems and entries are those of a young girl and a young woman with far less writing talent than Ann Frank.
I can tell that Nonnie was a wonderful person forever scarred by her holocaust experiences. I am sure she was a loving and caring wife and mother. Clearly her husband and children adored her. I do not wish to offend them with this review. I hope they take my suggestions to heart and hire an author to turn these diaries into a first rate book of fiction inspired by and based on Nonnie's life and her diaries.