Our Mother's War, A Biography of a Child of the Dutch Resistance
By Mel Fiske
Publisher: iUniverse, November 2007
124 pages
Review:
The late Lakshmi Radich's war experience began 68 years ago with the devastating German blitzkrieg. Until that day, Lakshmi, a cheerful 9-year-old Dutch girl, lived a peaceful and relatively unremarkable existence.
That all ended abruptly. In the early morning, German planes flying so low you could see the faces of the pilots in the cockpit unloaded their parachuting human cargo to capture the sleeping city. Initially refusing to surrender, Rotterdam took the brunt of heavy German bombing. At her worried mother's insistence, she and Lakshmi traveled by foot, braving heavy intermittent gunfire, to check on the well-being of the girl's grandmother, who lived a two-hour walk away.
If that journey had been the most harrowing part of her life during the war, Lakshmi would have been fortunate. With her father already a part of the Dutch mobilization, Lakshmi and her mother themselves joined the Dutch Resistance.
They harbored their Jewish neighbors, friends, and countless strangers. She declined to be labeled a hero. "I'm not a hero. I'm just a human being who did what had to be done when it needed to be done."
What she did was remarkable. Not only did she and her non-Jewish friends wear a Star of David to confuse the Germans until they caught on, she and her mother, after being found out, left their home and continued their efforts apart from one another to avoid being captured at the same time.
Radich left her childhood behind that day in May. She grew up quickly. She was forced to witness fellow citizens hanged from lampposts, their bodies left untouched as a reminder of the penalty for disobedience. She saw many deported to death camps. She was raped beginning at age 10 by men in every uniform, leaving her in an "emotional no-man's land" where "the scars of war run very deep."
She was able to keep informed of the war by listening to banned radio broadcasts from the West.
She never found her mother after the war, but she was reunited with her father. Her war ended on a train ride to Rotterdam with refugees returning from a death camp. She and a survivor with a shaved head shared a flea- and lice- infected sheepskin. They sat huddled together, legs dangling from a box car. It marked the physical but not psychological end to the war for her.
Her war experiences in no way trained her for life in Sonoma County, CA. She also found out what it was like to be a survivor but not always accepted as one because she was not Jewish.
In time, Lakshmi Radich, with the love, help and support of her two daughters, Christina and Laurina, along with counseling and spiritual growth through trips to India and the supportive Jewish community that recorded her story for the Holocaust Library, was able to come terms, if not peace, with her past so much so that she regained her faith in a God who could "allow such a horror to exist."
Rating: 
– Review by eldr.com member Noah Griffin [0] of Tiburon, CA.