A remarkable tale, dramatically affecting and historically significant.
Two sisters recount their terrifying experience in Auschwitz and their extraordinary survival.
Ruth and Manci Grunberger were both born in the 1920s in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, a small city at the base of the Carpathian Mountains. They lived a quiet, happy life free from any visible antisemitism and in a community that was largely isolated from the gathering storms that threatened Europe. That life changed once their land was annexed by Hungary in 1938. As Jews, they were forced to wear yellow stars, their father’s store was confiscated, and they were ejected from their home and forced to live in the Jewish ghetto. When the Germans arrived, they were sent on cattle cars to Auschwitz; Manci ruefully remembers it as “my life’s black day.” The sisters’ experiences were gruesome. Ruth puts it poignantly: “All the horrors that had been told were true. These innocent people, just off the trains, were being gassed to death and their lifeless bodies taken to the ovens and burned—the flames, the thick smoke, the heavy dust particles and the putrid odors were from bodies. Somehow, I managed to get back to the barracks. I was in shock and was screaming, ‘I know! I know everything!’ ” Seymour, the son-in-law of Manci, intelligently facilities the telling of the sad but ultimately inspiring tale. The entire Grunberger family was sent to Auschwitz, and Ruth and Manci were the only survivors, but their book is not a lamentation—they both managed to make their way to the United States following the war and start afresh. Of course, this is ground well covered in scholarly and literary terms, though the perspectives of women, particularly those subjected to the “death marches” in 1945, aren’t widely represented. This is a profoundly moving story courageously told, one that reveals the heights and depths of human possibility.
A remarkable tale, dramatically affecting and historically significant.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-9-49323-189-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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