Holocaust picture book online – The Story of Granny Girl as a Child

Read it page by page, in Hebrew and English side by side, and you’re following one specific little girl through one of the rarest kinds of source we have here: a Holocaust survivor’s own account of her childhood, written simply enough for a child to understand, and honest enough that nothing essential is left out.

Start from the beginning and read it straight through — it’s short enough for a single classroom sitting, and it ends somewhere worth arriving at. For more on who Susanne Ruth Raweh was and how this book came to be written, visit The Story of Granny-Girl background page

Each spread in the physical book pairs a Hebrew illustrated page with a facing plain-text English translation page. The file names below follow that pairing (e.g. `sus-5` = Hebrew/illustrated, `sus-5e` = English text).

1. The Story of Granny Girl as a Child Cover – English and Hebrew (sus-1)**

Opening illustration, dated 1944.

Hebrew title page (sus-2)**
Title and author/illustrator credit, in Hebrew.

English title & credits page (sus-3)**
Title, author and illustrator credit, rights and publication information (Shufra for Fine Literature, Tel Aviv, 2004), copyright notice, and acknowledgments from the author thanking family and friends who encouraged her to finally write down the story.

Dedication poem (sus-4 below Hebrew / sus-4e above English)**
A framing poem: the author imagines her own eventual passing, and says that instead of houses or wealth, she leaves her grandchildren *stories* — some joyful, some sad, all true — and that there’s one important story she wants to pass on as a keepsake.

Granny-girl as a child (sus-5 Hebrew / sus-5e English)**
Introduces “Granny-girl” as she was long ago: a lively, red-headed, outspoken little girl who loved dancing, picking flowers, decorating her hair with ribbons, and going with her parents to fairs and carousels — until one night everything changed.

The arrest (sus-6 Hebrew / sus-6e English)**
In the middle of the night, while everyone slept, armed men in uniform arrive without warning and take Granny-girl and her parents by force, ordering them onto a closed train bound for a concentration camp.

Camp conditions (sus-7 Hebrew / sus-7e English)**
Describes what a concentration camp was at that time — often just a repurposed barn, stable, or warehouse. People slept on hard bunks or infested straw, had little food or water, endured cold drafts through cracked walls, and were forced into hard labor building roads under guard, behind barbed wire.

Granny-girl’s spirit (sus-8 Hebrew / sus-8e English)**
Despite the conditions, Granny-girl refuses to stop dancing and playing, and her spirit makes the exhausted people around her laugh and briefly forget their fear. They repay her performances with small gifts — buttons, ribbons, one prized apple-green ribbon in particular.

Narrow escape (sus-9 Hebrew / sus-9e English)**
One morning, guards come to take away the elderly, the sick, and the children to be sent away permanently. Granny-girl hides under a bed but is found and brought to the camp gate, moments from being sent to her death — until a man standing there quietly tells her to run back to her mother. He is described as a fundamentally decent man who likely had a child of his own at home.

Camp to camp (sus-10 Hebrew / sus-10e English)**
An officer, moved by what he witnesses, has Granny-girl and her parents transferred from camp to camp instead, trying to protect them. They march long distances, hungry, ragged, and lice-ridden, until a kind soldier gives Granny-girl clean clothes, a doll, milk, and a hot meal. They continue on until reaching a small town.

The lollipop and the ship (sus-11 Hebrew / sus-11a English)**
In this town they find many other children left entirely alone, with no parents. At a market, Granny-girl is thrilled by a red-rooster lollipop — dirty but sweet — and licks it so much she falls ill. Meanwhile, the orphaned children are organized onto a transport toward Palestine, over mountains, valleys, and the Black Sea. Granny-girl’s parents, worried about sending their sick, very young daughter alone into the world, have second thoughts as the children’s transport is already underway.

Found again (sus-12 Hebrew / sus-12e English)**
Her parents send an urgent message asking that Little Susanne be found. In the darkness, a family acquaintance recognizes her on the train, coaxes her along gently, and cares for her privately until she recovers her health, then puts her on a fast train to continue her journey.

Family reunion (sus-13 Hebrew / sus-13e English)**
Getting off the train brings a joyful surprise: her father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are all waiting, and soon her mother arrives too, from a distant country. The reunited family travels together to Bucharest, where Granny-girl lives with her parents after the war.

 Epilogue (sus-14 Hebrew / sus-14d English)**
A factual, non-verse afterword giving the real family history behind the story: Dr. Siperstein’s family — himself, his wife Amalia, and their daughter Susanne — lived in Bucharest before the war but relocated to relatives in Tchernowitz (Chernivtsi) for safety.

The region’s shifting control between Romania, Ukraine, and Germany led to their deportation to Transnistria (Cariera de Piatră). Dr. Siperstein’s medical profession took him between several camps across the Bug River, and those movements ultimately helped the family survive. In the Tulchin ghetto, an orphan transport toward Palestine was organized; Susanne was briefly placed on it, but a family friend pulled her from the train before it reached port — sparing her, since the ship was later sunk.

She recovered from illness with that family friend in Iași before being reunited with her father in Tchernowitz, and later her mother, who had been in Ukraine. The family reached Bucharest in 1945; Susanne’s brother Dan Ben-Zion, named for their murdered grandfather, was born in 1950; the family was permitted to emigrate to Israel only in 1958.

Susanne later studied English Literature and Linguistics in Jerusalem, married Haim Raweh, and had two children, Dafna and Yoav. After her second grandchild was born, Dafna asked her grandmother to write down her story so it wouldn’t be lost — Susanne wrote it in simple verse for children, and Dafna illustrated it. That is how the book came to be.

Holocaust Picture Book Online

Source: Susanne Raweh (text) & Dafna Schonwald (illustrations), *The Story of Granny-Girl*, Hebrew Rights © 2004, Shufra for Fine Literature Ltd., Tel Aviv. Printed in Israel, 2004.

Total images in the online gallery:26

Format: Bilingual throughout — each story spread is Hebrew-illustrated-page + English-text-only facing page. The cover, title pages, and epilogue break this pattern slightly (epilogue’s Hebrew page includes an archival photograph rather than illustration).

Authorship split:

Text (verse) by Susanne Raweh; illustrations by her daughter Dafna Schonwald.
Publisher/rights: Shufra for Fine Literature Ltd., Tel Aviv; Hebrew rights © 2004; printed in Israel 2004; Israeli deposit number 469-1026 printed on the credits page.

This is a first-person survivor memoir written in simplified children’s verse, with a factual prose epilogue.