Eve Rosenzweig Kugler, nee Kanner, was born in the German city of Halle-an-der-Saale,
where her father owned a prosperous retail business and was a member of a small Orthodox
community. Raised in a loving Jewish home, she was unaware of the growing threat of Nazism
that began in 1933. In November 1938, when she was seven years old, stormtroopers invaded
the family home, arrested her father and destroyed his business. The terrifying events of
Kristallnacht brought about an amnesia of the Holocaust years that persisted and plagued
her for decades, until she asked her mother, Mia Amalia Kanner, to fill in all that
happened to the family during the missing years.
Shattered Crystals is Mia Amaila Kanner's remarkable story of her Jewish childhood in
Leipzig, Germany, her marriage and move to Halle, the birth of her three daughters and how
her idyllic life was shattered by the ever-increasing anti-semitic acts and laws after
Hitler came to power in 1933. She recounts her husband's visit to Palestine in 1935 and
the obstacles that thwarted the family's attempts to emigrate.
With her husband's imprisonment in Buchenwald, it fell to Mia not only to get her husband
Sal, out of the concentration camp, but also to get her entire family out of Germany. They
were miraculously able to escape to Paris, only to be faced with a renewed nightmare of
Jewish survival in France following the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi occupation
of France.
Coping with the rearrest of her husband, Mia faces the agonizing decision of giving up her
daughters and begins her life-saving association with the remarkable Jewish organization,
the OSE, and her tireless efforts on behalf of Jewish children during the war.
Shattered Crystals, the eleventh volume in C.I.S. Publishers' Holocaust Diaries
Collection, is the story of a courageous woman who, with steadfast faith in Heaven,
refused to despair but took unbelievable risks while fighting for her own life and that of
her family and friends. She outwitted the Nazis and their French collaborationist cohorts,
becoming one of a handful of survivrs of one of France's most notorious transit camps.