Fiction. With the German occupation and pacification of Belgrade in 1941, an uneasy sense of normalcy replaced the gunfire and the bombings. After weeks of home confinement, Yana Primuz, a sixteen-year-old Serbian girl, defies her mother's orders and slips out of the house to meet her friends, and to flirt with the boys. But a sudden Nazi roundup ensnares her. Shipped in a cattle car to a German work camp, Yana sees in the women's faces around her a reflection of her own terror. But wiping her tears she vows never to give in, to escape, to survive.
YANA is a riveting, bleak look at one of history's great atrocities. Its unsparing personal narrative and unflinching depiction of the horrors of war will place it among the classics of its genre.--Jasper DeWitt
It is Yana Primuz herself, known to be 'so good with words' who tells us of her forced removal as a teenager during WWII from Belgrade in Yugoslavia to a labor camp, Zella-Mehlis (historical, not a fiction), just south of Belsen in Germany. For years, she suffers from rape, from cold and hunger, is forced to kill, experiences love, observes a range of perpetrators and fellow victims who have us reeling as we read on toward a riveting ending. S. Sue McMillan and Paul M. Levitt, from this book's opening sentences through this young woman's liberation by the American army & beyond, create a Yana of authoritative voice--we are assured, by way of indisputable sensory detail, that she was there and now records the truth. This memoir-novel will frighten, thrill, enlighten, and serve as memorial for its readers of all ages.--William Heyen
No one wants to be in the middle of a state of entropy that war can create, unable to predict what s to come and having things gradually decline into disorder. Yet, these authors skillfully drag us in. This novel is an incredible coming-of-age story of a young Serbian woman, Yana, who is abducted from Belgrade, after the German occupation in WWII to be used as slave labor, making guns at a German factory, who manages to survive despite being abused, raped, starved and to fall in love, thus escaping the hell she had lived for four, long years.--Biljana D. Obradovic
