Izzy's Fire
Nancy Wright Beasley
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Brunswick Publishing
ISBN: 1556182082

Finding Humanity in the Holocaust.

Izzy’s Fire is a compelling account of how a Lithuanian Jewish couple & their nine-year-old son survived the extermination cullings at the Kovno Ghetto which the Nazis had created. They escaped into the farmlands where a Catholic family, living the words of their faith, hid them in a root cellar. It is a triumphant example of how we can adapt & survive with just the clothes on our backs, a little sunlight & fresh air, & unquenchable resources of compassion, quick-wittedness & determination.

Nancy Wright Beasley's seven-year journey started when she heard Alan Zimm, a Buchenwald survivor, recite the names of family members who died in the Holocaust. She realized the significance of recording survivor history the more she read, & when she discovered Edna Ipson's miraculous, she knew she had to write this book.

I came to as full a realization as a non-participant can of the Holocaust when I worked at a summer camp for the Midwest region of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, & met Elie Wiesel (20 years later he would be a Nobel Prize Winner, & is now the author of 40 books) who had just published his first, Night. He had been invited to speak to the Jewish community of campers, pioneers, counselors, rabbis & laypeople. It was the first time I had ever been allowed to touch the concentration camp number tattooed on a Holocaust survivor's forearm. He was an intensely vibrant being who made a difference in my life.

Izzy, Eta & their son survive until liberated by the Russian army, & then survive, all over again, the turmoil of the post-WWII Communist take-over of their homeland. The Ipps, as they were known then, made their way to Berlin, trying to emigrate to Israel, until family members in America secured their release. They came to Richmond, & changed their name upon naturalization as Americans.

Izzy’s Fire is an absorbing & despairing read with a litany of man's inhumanity to man: fathers & mothers, sisters & brothers, aunts & uncles torn from family groups & sent to the killing fields. Mixed in are intense insights into personal bravery, passion, faith, inexplicable intuition, & sheer “luck”.

The Holocaust did happen, as Eta avers when she hears people saying it didn't, & to that end her family recreated the story of their three-year survival in that potato cellar, in the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

Izzy’s Fire is an extraordinary account of extraordinary times & opportunities when lethal danger dogged everyone's steps, & still the heart of humanity beat, & saved three souls so they could survive to come out on “the other side of hell.”

Other books about WWII non-combatant survivors we have reviewed are:
Memories of World War II
Pursuit of Freedom
Laughter Wasn't Rationed
The Children of Willesden Lane
The Orphans of Normandy
(08/14/05)

Rebecca