David Michael Slater’s “The Vanishing” is a transcendent experience. Sophie Siegel is still only a little girl when the Third Reich begins passing new laws intent on victimizing Jews and other minorities. On the morning of her eleventh birthday, this culminates in being forced to watch, stashed away in a closet, while a group of Nazis brutally murder her parents.
Afterwards, the girl is left invisible to the world around her. She can touch others. She can pick things up and still needs to eat and bathe and do everything else that makes a human, human. It is a blessing, because she is safe from the Nazi’s. It is a horror, because she is forced to watch those she cares about be tortured, killed and treated like animals. All of it, she must weather alone. If there is one thing she can do with her newfound vanishing, however, it would be to make it her life’s mission to keep her young best friend, Giddy Goldfarb, safe. Over the next four years, and in life beyond the war, Sophie will become his own guardian angel. Following him from the ghetto, to a commandant’s mansion, and through the wilderness of Germany, Sophie learns that in a world full of horrors, by working together and bonding with those we fight with, she, Giddy and newfound friends can become an everlasting blessing in the lives of others.
