Out of the Coal Bin is an unusual Holocaust memoir of a childhood in Budapest during the Nazi period. Susan Charney tells a poignant and unsparing tale of a young girl living with a false identity during the war and coping with the confusion and dislocation that followed. She conveys the fragmentary understandings and intuitions of her younger self, as she revisits her questions and assumptions about her family's survival, recalling the moments at which fate might have altered the outcome of her life. The descriptions are detailed and vivid so that the full physical and psychological...