This book is kind of hard to categorize. It's about the Holocaust and yet it isn't. The Holocaust permeates every page, and the book would not have been published otherwise, but it's not even mentioned in the narrative -- because it hadn't happened yet.

After a little girl named Kitty was born in a middle-class home in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1929, her adoring father kept a baby book for her. He measured her growth and intellectual progress, and talked about her various illnesses (Kitty seems to have been a sickly child) and what she ate, and how much, and the frequency and quality of her poop, in an almost scientific way, for years. After Kitty was about four he wrote less often, but he still made entries once in awhile. She was his only child.

Kitty was a very bright little girl and would have had much to offer the world. When she was three the maid taught her to write a little and do simple math. At the same age she also spoke German, Slovak and Hungarian, and she picked up a little Hebrew later. After she entered school she was always the best student (though not the best-behaved one; she was a handful).

But her intellectual gifts never resulted in anything. Béla Weichherz's last entry was in the spring of 1942, when Kitty was twelve. A short time later the entire family was deported to a concentration camp, and ultimately to Sobibor, where they died in the gas chambers.

I've never much cared for the Cult of Anne Frank, in part because they try to make her into some saintly figure when she was really just a normal teenage girl. Well, no one could make Kitty into an icon. It would be pretty hard to when her dad keeps talking about her feces and her infant masturbation and all the times she misbehaved and had to be spanked.

Which is what makes it all the more meaningful. Kitty and her family were very ordinary people, nothing particularly special about them. And almost all the victims of the Holocaust were just the same. Kitty's baby book is an example of what we really lost.

Keep this all in mind before you read the book. It's not the kind of book for everyone, or even every Holocaust aficionado. ( )