In November 1941 the worst nightmare of the Jews in Zolkiew, Poland came true: the Nazis marched into town and demanded that all Jews must live in the ghetto or they would be killed.  Knowing the fate that awaited them in the ghetto, Meir Schwarz frantically searched for a place of refuge for his wife and two teenage daughters Clara and Mania.  Unfortunately none of the family’s many Gentile friends and acquaintances were willing or able to risk their own safety to hide the family until suddenly, miraculously, just as only a few days remained before they must enter the ghetto, Mr. Beck, a man reputed to be a drunk, a philanderer and an Anti-Semite, offered to protect not only the Schwarz Family but two other families as well. 

With no choice but to trust their unlikely savior, the families crept into their new life: a primitive dirt bunker hastily dug beneath the Beck’s house where eventually 18 people would hide.  For months the families would live together crowded and hot, with little food and water, a shared bucket as a toilet, trying to be as polite, pleasant, and, above all, as quiet as possible knowing that each knock on the Beck’s door could mean discovery and death.   As if the circumstances weren’t difficult enough, Mr. Beck himself contributed to the unbelievably stressful conditions since he was indeed a drunken adulterer given to boasting and violence, but the families were wholly dependent upon him and soon learned that a brave and loving heart did lie beneath his unpleasant exterior.  Young Clara Schwarz recorded her family’s ordeal in a diary she kept underground, and now in Clara’s War, she shares her incredible story of a complicated, contradictory hero and the families he saved.