The Girl from Sighet

The Girl from Sighet a memoir In 1944, Hindi Friedman's idyllic childhood in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains abruptly ended when German troops invaded her beloved hometown of Sighet. This memoir, written in the style of a novel, chronicles Hindi and her family's confinement in the town's ghetto, their transport in a suffocating cattlecar to Auschwitz, and the subsequent heroic struggle to survive the inhumane conditions of the concentration camp. After Russian soldiers liberated Hindi and her sister from a labor camp in the Czech Republic, the young girls immediately faced a harsh new reality. Their liberators were now the enemy. Weak and hungry, the girls escape by foot over the Czech mountains to avoid the savagery of the Russian soldiers. Two years after the war ended, Hindi was again on the run. Trapped in communist Romania, she escaped into Austria and eventually to her new home in America. This epic memoir spans seventy years, transporting the reader from shtetl life through war-torn Europe to the American suburbs of the fifties and on to the present, allowing us to partake in a remarkable journey from death and despair to hope and rebirth.