Four Perfect Pebbles

Content Warning: The section of the guide contains discussions of discrimination, graphic violence, and death.

Marion Blumenthal Lazan was nine years old when she and her family were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi Germany in 1944, living there until April 1945. The Blumenthals originally left Germany for Holland to escape Nazi persecution, but the threat followed them, and they lived in the Westerbork transit camp (originally a refugee camp) for four years before being sent back to Germany. After living in Bergen-Belsen—where Anne and Margot Frank also lived—for over a year, the Blumenthals were put into cattle cars and transported to an unknown destination. While they were on their way, Germany fell, and various allied forces liberated the camps and trains. The Blumenthals, and those on the train with them, were liberated by Russian troops as the war ended.

Marion’s memoir details her family’s years of living in the camps, watching people die of Typhus or starvation. Her memoir concludes with a retelling of the immediate years following liberation, when she and her family emigrated to America. The memoir explores the human impact of the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.