A cold-eyed look at one woman’s incredible journey through hell and back.
Restrained, well-handled chronicle, told primarily through letters among family members, of the five years spent by the author’s mother in Nazi labor camps.
Sala Garncarz married an American GI at the end of the war and never spoke to her children about her experiences. In 1991, at age 67 and headed for triple-bypass surgery, she handed a box of letters to her daughter. Kirschner, a New York management consultant, translated them and unraveled a terrible saga. Sala was the youngest of 11 children in Sosnowiec, Poland, which before the war enjoyed a thriving Jewish culture much like that of Lódz and nearby Bedzin. At 16, she was rebellious and determined to take her older sister Raizel’s place when the occupying Nazis selected young people from poor homes to work in the growing labor camps. Her “job” was supposed to last for six weeks, but she was instead shuttled for five years among seven camps, part of the slave-labor network that sustained the Nazis’ wartime manufacturing and construction. Part of Sala’s amazing ability to survive was no doubt due to her skill at sewing; she became a seamstress and laundress for the German officers, chosen and accepted as “one clean Jew.” She was also a leader among her peers, attractive and well-liked. Early on, she formed a protective friendship with an older woman named Ala Gertner, and relationships with various men helped her secure favored treatment. Unlike concentration camps such as Auschwitz (where most of her family perished after the roundup at Sosnowiec on Aug. 12, 1942), labor camps permitted inmates to send and receive letters, which were jealously hoarded as frail ties to family and truth. Kirschner allows her mother’s poignant story to emerge from these heartbreaking missives, filling in the gaps with a dignified, quietly eloquent connecting narrative.
A cold-eyed look at one woman’s incredible journey through hell and back.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8938-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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