ied Europe and England. The children are aged between ten and eighteen and recount the horrid experiences they lived through during the Holocaust and WW2. It is evident throughout Hollidays’ book that memory is composed of personal feelings and bias, making it completely subjective. It is apparent that each of the children wrote about what was important to them at the time. Adolf Hitler may have been executing thousands of Jews a block away, but Janine Phillips was more intent on writing about her sister’s movement from one concentration camp to another. It is a fact that one recalls experiences differently according to their current state of emotions and feelings. Hollidays’ book gives a number of different contradicting accounts of the Holocaust. Dirk Van der Heide, a twelve-year-old boy living in Holland recounts a German bombardment in his hometown of Rotterdam. He describes how there were four hundred Germans attacking with guns and other such weaponry. Sarah Fishkin was another child living in Rotterdam at the time of this exact bombardment. Unlike Dirk Van der Heide, she recounts the bombardment as being reasonably small and undisruptive, with only sixty Germans attacking. Such contradicting accounts of the same event show how memory is subjective, to ones current situation. Diary entries are usually written immediately after an event has occurred and such immediate response may cause an under or over exaggeration of the situation, adding to memories subjective nature. Laurel Hollidays’ book has been composed in such a way so as to resemble a diary. The cover is a mottled blue design and the corners and the spine have been coloured red, so as to give the impression of being bound. Each of the diary entries is dated and separated by a single line, again, so as to resemble a diary. Such a layout gives the impression that they are real diary entries and personal, therefore subjective accounts of the holocaus...
