The Seven Year Dress by Paulette Mahurin Review! @MahurinPaulette

One of the darkest times in human history was the insane design and execution to rid the world of Jews and “undesirables.” At the hands of the powerful evil madman Adolf Hitler, families were ripped apart and millions were slaughtered. Persecution, torture, devastation, and enduring the unthinkable remained for those who lived. 

This is the story of one woman who lived to tell her story. This is a narrative of how a young beautiful teenager, Helen Stein, and her family were torn asunder, ultimately bringing her to Auschwitz. It was there she suffered heinous indignity at the hands of the SS. It was also there, in that death camp, she encountered compassion, selfless acts of kindness, and friendship. 

Written by the award-winning, best-selling author of His Name Was Ben, comes a story of the resilience of the human spirit that will leave you thinking about Helen Stein and The Seven Year Dress for years to come after the last page is shut. 

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Paulette Mahurin lives with her husband Terry and three dogs, Max, Bella, and Lady Luck in Ventura County, California. She grew up in West Los Angeles and attended UCLA, where she received a Master's Degree in Science.

While in college, she won awards and was published for her short-story writing. One of these stories, Something Wonderful, was based on the couple presented in His Name Was Ben, which she expanded into the fictionalized novel in 2014. The first week out, His Name Was Ben, made it to top ten books sold in the Amazon Kindle store (topic: health/wellness/cancer). Her first novel, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap, made it to Amazon bestseller lists and won awards, including best historical fiction of the year 2012 in Turning the Pages Magazine.

Semi-retired, she continues to work part-time as a Nurse Practitioner in Ventura County. When she's not writing, she does pro-bono consultation work with women with cancer, works in the Westminister Free Clinic as a volunteer provider, volunteers as a mediator in the Ventura County Courthouse for small claims cases, and involves herself, along with her husband, in dog rescue.

Profits from her books go to help rescue dogs.

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My Thoughts

Myra is a young student looking for a room, she is interviewed by an elderly woman, Helen Stein asked a lot of personal questions. Myra debates on whether or not to rent the room but decides that she does need a place that she can afford.

There is a reason behind all of Helen's personal questions she asks of Myra. Finding out that Helen has a number tattooed on her wrist is the clue to Helen's background. Helen tells the story of how she ended up with the tattoo, see, all inmates of the concentration camps are tattooed with numbers and once behind that fencing, are no longer a person, no longer have identities. That is the horror of Nazi Germany and the atrocities that one race of people inflicted on another.

Helen's story starts out in the 1920's, born of a Jewish family, living in Berlin. She was born after the Great War, at a time when Germany was floundering and looking for a leader, they found it in Adolf Hitler. Helen really didn't realize at a young age how the Nazi party was going to affect her and her family and what she was going to lose as a result of one man's hatred of the Jews.With the advent of Kristallnacht, Helen and her family's lives implode into a horrible series of events that find Helen interred at Auschwitz. 

Helen's story is one of many to come out of this terrible time in history, even though this is historical fiction, I could tell by the author's words, that this was a story she wanted to tell with compassion and honesty about a woman who could very well have lived during this time and experienced the atrocities of the fanatics that were the Nazi Party. I enjoyed it immensely.

I received this book for review purposes and my honest opinion.