This book is a memoir where the main character finds herself in one horrible situation after another during Hungary’s experience of World War II. The title of the book has been inspired by the main character’s observation of people getting thrown into the Danube after they are made to leave their shoes behind and also from the time when the main character didn’t have any shoes of her own and used rags to wrap around her feet.

The book opens with this scene. On January 8, 1945, 13-year-old Marianne Klein (a.k.a Marika Roth) is thrown out of her house together with her parents and other people by the Nazis, who claim the agreement of the safe houses for the Jewish population to have become null and void. The people are made to stand in the courtyard and are fired upon. Marianne acts as if she is dead and doesn’t move even when a soldier kicked her badly on the ribs.

The story retreats backward in time to Marianne’s earlier life, when her parent’s marriage break up when she is six then to her being placed in a convent due to her mother’s suffering from tuberculosis, and then to her being made to live with her mother’s father who wasn’t very happy to have the girl live with him. Later, when the grandfather doesn’t want her anymore the girl is moved to a Jewish orphanage even though she isn’t an orphan.

When her mother dies and later the Germans invade Hungary in 1944, Marianne flees to her father, but together with her father and all the other Jews she is placed in an apartment complex, and the Germans take away the men together with her father who promises to come back to Marianne no matter what, and this promise keeps the girl going until the end. Soon after her father’s being taken away the massacre at the courtyard happens.

The real story of Marianne starts after the massacre, and it is a story of human resilience. To say more on the plot would be giving it away, but this is not fiction and the story is heart-rending and also giving hope since Marianne’s story turns out to become a real success.

Memoirs keep the history alive, and especially one like All the Pretty Shoes leave a legacy on only to one’s offspring but to the entire human race.

The voice of in this book is sincere and the language is clear and the story flows pretty well. I was especially taken by the young girl’s intelligence and wisdom that outwitted her enemies several times.

learning about resilience and the atrocities during a war and what people may go through while living in such situations.

Marianne's resolve for survival.

is Marika Roth who was in the Canadian adoption program after the war and later found jobs in Beverly Hills Ca. and had quite a good life.

If this was fiction, I'd pick on it, but life has a flow of its own, and I think the memoirist did the best she could with her experiences.

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Created Mar 11, 2019 at 5:59pm • Submit your own review...