Title: The Girl From Scorpions Pass
Author: Miri Furstenberg
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Autobiography, Historical
Rating: 5 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Five-year-old Miri is left for dead in a brutal terror attack that kills her parents!

On a desert night a little girl lies shivering under a dead body near a bullet riddled bus too frightened to cry. The violated body of her mother is strewn nearby. Her father, the bus driver, sits slumped over the wheel; his blood has mingled with that of twelve dead passengers. She cannot see her older brother.

Rescued by soldiers hours later, the horror of that night remains locked in her heart…

A few hours later an army patrol stumbles onto the scene of what the morning newspapers will call “The Massacre at Scorpions Pass.” Miri Furstenberg was five-years-old, and sixty years would pass before she finds the courage to write about that horrible night.

Until its secrets and her amazing life story are finally revealed in these pages

Miri and the State of Israel were both born in 1948, and her story is bound together with evocative scenes from the country’s own. From Tel Aviv in the austere 1950’s, to the relative comfort of kibbutz life, helping unearth Masada, and serving in uniform during the Six Day War, the author’s vivid memories and stark self-reflection make riveting reading.

The Girl From Scorpions Pass begins with a tragic, dark story. Five-year-old Miri lay shivering under a dead body never a bullet-riddled bus. She was too scared to cry. Her father, the bus driver, was dead. Her mother wasalso murdered during the massacre. All passengers were dead. Her brother ended up in a coma during this terrible event. , which would later be deemed “The Scorpions Pass Massacre”.

Five years old, and already scarred like that, it took Miri sixty years to pen down her experiences of that dreadful night. Of course there’s a lot more the author describes in this book about her life, from describing life in Tel Aviv in the 1950s to her service during the Six Day War, and much more – but it all begins on that fateful, life-altering day.

It’s horrible to think about massacres such as this one, about terrible tragedies befalling people all over the world, and it’s even more terrible when it happens to people this young. I can’t even imagine. Reading this book will no doubt bring tears in your eyes; it even made me cry. The author has a lot of vevacity and courage, and her strength shows through every page of this book.