Someone Named Eva
by Joan Wolf
Milada is happy with her life, despite the fact that Czechoslovakia has been invaded by Hitler’s Nazi’s. She believes her papa when he says that if they are patient and have faith, everything will turn out all right in the end. But that gets harder to believe the night the Nazi’s take away her papa and older brother and send all the females of the town to a nearby city. It gets even harder when she is taken away from her mama and grandmother and baby sister just because she has blond hair and blue eyes. Despite her grandmother’s warning to “remember who you are,” Milada soon finds herself becoming the German Aryan girl the Nazis want her to be. First she forgets how to say a few words in Czech, then the special name she had for her grandmother, and finally her very own name.
Very little is known about the Nazi program of “repatriotism,” which involved taking children who matched the standard of Aryan ideals and turning them into proper German children. Despite the relative comfort Milada lives in, there is always a hint of evil and great horror around the edges. While perhaps not as terrifying as stories of concentration camps, Milada’s story - based on actual events - will chill you to the bone.
