Finished: Hiding in the Spotlight (Dawson) Book Club Book # 9...a pretty good book. The material, a true story, was tragic and fascinating, and better than the actual writing in the book, if that makes sense. Two young Jewish sisters, Zhanna and Frina, piano prodigies in Ukraine in 1942, are marched towards their deaths, along with their mother, father and grandparents. They are to be mercilessly shot down by the Nazis and shoved into the man-made ditch known as Drobitsky Yar. Their father pulls out his only worthy possession, a pocket watch, and bribes an officer to let his oldest daughter, Zhanna, run from the march. He knows that Zhanna will survive the run into the forrest, and he tells her as he wraps his big coat around her, to live no matter what. Heartbroken, teenage Zhanna runs, her only possession...her copy of Chopin's piano sheet music Fantasie Impromptu, which she had mastered as a young girl. Through the obvious trials and tribulations of trying to avoid the Nazis, find shelter and food, and through the extreme kindness of strangers who would have been killed for helping her, Zhanna makes her way back to her hometown, where miraculously her sister turns up alive as well. Frina, though, will never speak of the march or tell her exactly how she too escaped. Again, with the kindness of strangers, the girls are told the only way for them to hope to survive is to pretend to be non-Jewish Russian refugees, change their names and get official papers with those names. To do so, they must go to an orphanage and tell their made-up story, that their father was a Russian soldier killed in the war and their mother a war victim as well. They manage to change their names, which they use for years...and they manage to play whatever piano is available until one day they are heard by German officers who insist they play for them at various concerts! Eventually they are made part of a troupe that is used to entertain the German soldiers who are now occupying their city. Sadly, though, when the war is finally over, the girls are still not free. The Germans force the entire troupe to retreat with them to Berlin where they are kept in pretty deplorable conditions. It's not until the treaty of Yalta is signed that the girls are discovered in a camp by an American solider, Larry Dawson, who is mesmerized by their talent. The girls already know that they cannot go back to Russia, much as Zhanna longs to, because Stalin is executing all returning Russian who were taken prisoner by the Germans. He irrationally blames them for being captured, even turning a blind eye to his own son who was captured in the war. Isn't that awful? Anyway...Larry makes it his mission to get the girls to America. It means he and his wife will have to adopt them. His wife is at home with their two very young boys. Larry makes the arrangements and gets his brother David, a talented musician who seventeen years earlier entered Julliard at the age of 13, involved as well. Larry is convinced that he can get the girls an audition to Julliard when he gets home and the rest will be history. And, well...that's kind of how it goes! Oh, and Zhanna, who is 19 by the time she meets David and auditions for Julliard, ends up falling in love with David and they get married and have two sons...one of them the author, Greg Dawson. Both Zhanna and David end up teaching music on the college level and playing in various orchestras. Frina has the near same story, though the focus of this book was on the author's mother, Zhanna. Frina also becomes an accomplished performer and marries and has children. It's a happy ending to a very traumatic life for these two young survivors of the horrific Jewish extinction of World War II.