Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.
This chillingly meticulous chronicle of a dozen escapees from a Nazi extermination camp underscores the mechanics of heroism and the fallibility of memory.
Journalist Heath, a National Magazine Award winner, ably narrates the disturbing story of the camp at Ponar, Lithuania (“never a work camp”), where 70,000 Jews were rounded up, shot, and dumped in pits, beginning in July 1941, only to be disinterred and burned to hide the evidence. Throughout, the author expertly highlights the grisly contradictions and trauma of the Holocaust. Although what happened at Ponar had been documented by the end of World War II, the story was relegated to a footnote for the next 30 years. The author masterfully resurrects the events, tracing accounts of the 12 men who miraculously escaped through a tunnel they dug at the killing pits on the night of April 15, 1944. As Heath recounts, they had been among 80 Jewish prisoners who were sent to the pit site to perform the grisly duties of digging up the decomposed corpses and burning them on towering pyres—so that, in the “magical thinking” of the Nazis, no trace of the crimes would be left as the Soviet troops advanced. However, not only did the 12 men escape and tell their stories—many not believed, though one testified at Nuremberg—but some of the inhabitants of the forest town also saw what was going on, including a journalist neighbor who documented the activity in a diary that was later found and published in 1999. Heath painstakingly sifts through the conflicting accounts over the decades, analyzing discrepancies, details, and contradictions. Ultimately, he learned, just like the survivors, “of how great the distance could be between speaking out and being heard.”
Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780805243710
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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