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SAVED FROM THE NAZIS BY A CAT NAMED ANGEL

Hephzibah Anderson

Mala’s Cat

Mala Kacenberg Michael Joseph £14.99

Hiding in a Polish forest during the Second World War, Mala Kacenberg, 14 years old and small for her age, met some partisans. ‘If you survive, you will have a very interesting story to tell,’ they said after hearing of her experiences. Against extraordinary odds, she did survive, and this is her story. It’s an account of astounding courage and resourcefulness, of unimaginable loss and an unshakeable will to live so that she might bear witness.

It begins in the town of Tarnogród, where Mala’s happy childhood was cut short by the outbreak of war when she was just 12. Though Jewish, her blonde hair, blue eyes and fair complexion enabled her to pass as a Christian.

One day in 1942 she’d been begging for food in nearby villages, and when she returned to the ghetto, found that everyone had been rounded up. A note left by her sister, Balla, warned her not to join them in the marketplace.

Mala would never again see any of her immediate family, and later learned they’d been put in wooden shacks and burned alive. From that moment on she was alone, her only company a cat that had followed her since she was small.

She named the cat Malach, meaning ‘angel’ in Hebrew, and twice Malach saved her life, first clawing a German soldier’s face and, later, alerting her to the need to hide by refusing to leave a ditch as soldiers approached.

But Mala was also protected, she writes, by being too young to take in much of the horror she witnessed. ‘For what normal person could absorb what was happening then?’ Eventually she adopted a Christian alias and managed to join a convoy of Polish workers being sent to Germany. There, hiding in plain sight as a hotel maid, she witnessed the fall of the Third Reich from within.

She later made a new life in London, and around the time of her marriage, Malach vanished.

‘Anyone who survived the Holocaust survived with miracles,’ she writes. Magical though the cat of this unsentimental, profoundly moving book’s title appears – and at points I did wonder if it was more symbolic talisman than actual feline – it plays only a minor role, and the real miracle here is the vitality of Kacenberg’s faith and determination.

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2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

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