Tell No One Who You Are

Walter Buchignani

Tundra Books

One of the rea­sons I find the Christmas sea­son so busy is that I have to spend time read­ing the books I am going to give away. It just doesn’t seem right to have a book in my pos­ses­sion, even for a short time, and not at least try to read it. After years of prac­tice, I have become a fast and tidy reader. This past Christmas I made it through most of my gift-to-be books with­out leav­ing a trace. I started with the books I had to mail. For my niece in Ottawa, I chose Tell No One Who You Are by Walter Buchignani (Tundra Books). It is an account of three years in the life of a young Jewish girl in Belgium — three years dur­ing which she was hid­den from the Nazis by non-Jews. While Regine Miller’s fam­ily were dying at Auschwitz, she had to con­ceal her true iden­tity as she was shuf­fled from home to home — a tall order for a ten-year-old. The most shock­ing thing in the book is a repro­duc­tion of a typed page that lists the names of Regine’s mother, father, brother, aunt and uncle. Beside each name is a date and a con­voy num­ber: the des­ti­na­tion is recorded as Auschwitz.