Claiming My Place

Claiming My Place is the true story of a young Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by escaping to Nazi Germany and hiding in plain sight.

Meet Gucia Gomolinska: smart, determined, independent, and steadfast in the face of injustice. Growing up in Poland in the 1920s and ’30s, Gucia studies hard, makes friends, falls in love, and dreams of a bright future.

Her world is turned upside down when Nazis descend upon Poland, establishing in her town of Piotrków Trybunalski the first Jewish ghetto of World War II. As the war escalates, Gucia watches friends and neighbors lose their livelihoods, their dignity, their lives.

She knows her blond hair and fair skin give her an advantage, and eventually she faces a harrowing choice: to risk the uncertain horrors of deportation to a concentration camp or the certain death if she were caught resisting. She decides to assume a false identity as a gentile. Gucia changes her name to Danuta Barbara Tanska, nicknamed Basia, and leaves behind everything and everyone she has ever known. If she succeeds she will remain free; but if she fails she will perish.

Working from extensive interviews with her subject and in consultation with Basia’s daughter, Helen Reichmann West, author Planaria Price tells this incredible life story directly in the first person in an inspiring work of narrative nonfiction.