The World That We Knew

Young adolescents Lea and Ettie do not recall a world without the Nazis. In their world, Jews constantly fear the sudden hammer-stroke intrusion of the Gestapo and the ever-present anxiety over deportation to the extermination camps. This is a world of death. The World That We Knew—despite its fairy-tale veneer and its closing affirmation of love and the possibility of hope—offers a dark, troubling vision of a brutal and grim world. Hanni’s mother, the wizened Bobeshi, defines it as a world of hunters and wolves. Drawing on memories of her childhood growing up in the forbidding wintry wastes of central Russia, Lea’s grandmother cautions her granddaughter that the world has two forces, hunters carrying rifles astride horses and the peaceful wolves they hunt only to kill. The hunters, the grandmother assures Lea, are anything but careful. They’re indiscriminate in their shooting, trying only to kill something, anything that moves, without imperative, logic, or morality. That is the world of Nazi Germany, she tells her granddaughter through her tale. Against and amid that terrifying world of ruthless, heartless hunters, the wolves scavenge to survive. Innocent of evil intent and bearing no animus toward the hunters, the wolf goes about its life and attacks only “when it is wounded or starving […] when it must survive” (6).