As Long As I Hope to Live: The moving, true story of a Jewish girl and her schoolfriends under Nazi occupation

Description

'An extraordinary book . . . vivid and heart-breaking' The Jewish Chronicle Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the War. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away. Alie and her mother were to die in Sobibor in 1943. Alie's sister Gretha survived Auschwitz and kept her promise to her sister to preserve the friendship album so long as she hoped to live. This book will sit alongside Anne Frank's diary and The Cutout Girl as a unique window into occupied Amsterdam and the girls who will now never be forgotten.

Claudia Carli's friendship with Alie Lopes Dias's sister Gretha and discovery of Alie's friendship album set her on a decade-long mission to trace the girls' lives and preserve their memories. Her book is as faithful as it can be to every detail she learned from Gretha and the few women who have survived. She is currently a project leader for the educational project War In My Neighbourhood, which brings elderly and children together around stories from WW2. She lives in Amsterdam.

'An extraordinary book ... vivid and heart-breaking' * The Jewish Chronicle *