ARTS&LIFE BOOKS
Danica Davidson
Letting Go of Hatred
C
hildren’s author Danica Davidson had authored more than a dozen books when she experienced hatred as a journalist for a major cable media outlet in 2015 because she was Jewish. “I had an editor who lectured to me that it was no big deal to refer to Jewish people as Nazis,” said Davidson, who lives in Kalamazoo. “I was told that, overall, the Jews didn’t have it that bad and only suffered a few bad years in the 1940s. It was then I realized the gravity of the Holocaust was becoming trivialized, and there was a widespread ignorance about the history of the events leading up to and during the Holocaust.”
New children’s novel tells a survivor’s story of tolerance and forgiveness. STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Davidson is author of the new children’s novel I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz (Little, Brown, April 5, 2022). It is the account of co-writer, Holocaust survivor and educator Eva Moses Kor, who died in 2019 at age 85. A native of Burbank, Calif., Davidson remembers hearing stories of hatred toward Jews from her own family stories; her great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe to escape pogroms. Growing up, her father provided her with books about the Holocaust, she attended an eighth-grade public school field
trip to the museum of tolerance and read the play based on The Diary of Anne Frank. By high school, Davidson’s family moved to Sturgis, Mich., where she discovered she was one of the only Jewish students in her school. “I went to school and used Yiddish phrases I just assumed everyone knew,” Davidson recalled. “I remember bringing matzah to school for lunch during Passover and the kids around me did not understand why I was eating it.” Davidson also assumed everyone around her was well read about the Holocaust. Now, well into her adulthood in her 30s, she is alarmed at statistics
Eva Mozes Kor
that reveal a growing number of adults under 40 had never even heard of the term “Holocaust.” After her unpleasant brush with antisemitism in the workplace, Davidson delved further into learning about the history of discrimination and persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust when, in 2018, she met Kor, who was giving a talk at Western Michigan University. It was right there when Davidson presented turning Kor’s story into a children’s book; Kor met the idea with great enthusiasm. They got to work, through a series of in-person and telephone interviews, developing the manuscript.
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