Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust

The twentieth-anniversary edition of Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s acclaimed Holocaust memoir features new material by the author, a reading group guide, a map, and additional photographs. “The writing is direct, devastating, with no rhetoric or exploitation. The truth is in what’s said and in what is left out.”—ALA Booklist (starred review)

Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family—father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert—were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps, including Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, before finally making it to the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.

Four Perfect Pebbles features forty archival photographs, including several new to this edition, an epilogue, a bibliography, a map, a reading group guide, an index, and a new afterword by the author. First published in 1996, the book was an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and IRA Young Adults’ Choice, and a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and the recipient of many other honors. “A harrowing and often moving account.”—School Library Journal

In Her Own Words...

"I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and had a very ordinary and uneventful (as it seemed to me) childhood. I read voraciously, but it never occurred to me that I would one day become a writer. For one thing, I had never met a "real, live author," as young people do nowadays in their schools and libraries. And, in any case, most of the writers I read in my growing-up years, like Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, were dead.

"I didn't begin to publish juvenile fiction and nonfiction until my own children were in the fourth or fifth grades at school. I was stimulated by their expanding interests and by the realization that I had a great need to explore the longsilent world of my own childhood.

"Soon I was writing contemporary novels for middle-graders, among them the "Fat Glenda" series. I also became intrigued with the reaches and challenges of nonfiction. I ventured into the American culinary past with titles like Slumps, Grunts, and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why (Clarion). And I traveled to distant Egypt to do on-site research for Mummies, Tombs, and Treasure (Clarion).

"When I met Marion Blumenthal Lazan and heard her speak about her experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, I knew that here was a story that had to be put into book form.

"As part of the Blumenthal family's six-and-a-half years under the Nazi yoke, Marion, her parents, and her brother spent fourteen months in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Germany. This was the very camp in which Anne Frank had died ... and at the same time that Marion and her family were there. Anne Frank left us no writings of her life in the camps. But Marion was able to convey to us the details of daily life, and of death, in that place of most indescribable horror.

"When Marion told me about the "four perfect pebbles" that she sought to gather each day on the barren grounds of the camp, I felt that that would be the perfect title for the book. For the lonely and frightened nine-year-old, the sets of matching pebbles offered some kind of assurance that Mama, Papa, her brother, Albert, and she would survive Bergen-Belsen, if not the war-long effects of the Holocaust itself.

"It's a source of great pride to me that Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story, which agreed to co-author at great emotional expense, is my fiftieth published book."

<br /><br />Marion Blumenthal Lazan s unforgettable memoir Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story (Greenwillow Books) recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood.

Following Hitler s rise to power, the Blumenthal family father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps that included Westerbork in Holland and the notorious Bergen-Belsen in Germany. Though they all survived the camps, Walter Blumenthal, Marion s father, succumbed to typhus just after liberation.

It took three more years of struggle and waiting before Marion, Albert, and their mother at last obtained the necessary papers and boarded ship for the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.

An outstanding speaker, Marion Blumenthal Lazan has shared her moving first-hand account of the Blumenthal family s life in Germany, from the events preceding Kristallnacht to imprisonment in concentration camps to liberation in April of 1945, with upwards of one million students and adults. Her Holocaust experiences and messages of respect and tolerance go beyond the facts and inspire audiences around the world. The praise she has received from event hosts