Suitcases and Backpacks - Growing through the Holocaust

Suitcases and Backpacks is a testimony of intricate detail that describes a young girl's survival in ghettos and concentration camps between 1942 and 1945. Readers follow her heartbreaking journey from Vienna to the Theresienstadt Ghetto to Auzchwitz to a labor camp near Breslau, followed by the alienation she feels upon returning to Vienna, her subsequent journey to Prague, and finally the realization of her dream to immigrate to Palestine.

Chava Kohavi Pines was born Eva Hirsch in 1927 in Vienna, Austria, to a middle-class Jewish family. Since immigrating to Palestine in 1946, the author has resided in Kibbutz Dorot in the northern Negev where she worked as a teacher and counselor for years. Only with forty years' distance from the trauma of her youth has she been able to write an account of some of her experiences under Hitler.