A unique war story from a brave man.
Submerged memories of a remarkable encounter in Auschwitz drove an aged British World War II veteran to reveal his plainspoken, moving story—assisted by BBC journalist Broomby.
Avey admits he did not join the army in 1939 “for King and Country,” but rather for adventure; as a strapping farm boy, he proved a crack rifleman and a natural-born leader. After ordeals fighting Mussolini’s forces in Libya and General Rommel’s forces in North Africa, he was taken prisoner in 1944 and transported to Auschwitz, where he was enlisted to help build a massive rubber factory by the IG Farben company. Though English prisoners were treated fairly well, they toiled alongside a separate group of miserable, starved wretches the English called “stripeys,” because of their tattered pajama-like outfits, hardly human “moving shadows” who were barely strong enough to lift anything—the Jews. Gradually, Avey befriended several of the crew, including a man named Ernst and learned that the Jews were simply worked to death (unlike the Englishmen), then vaporized “up the chimney,” sending out the sickly sweet odor Avey had noticed. “The scales were lifted from my eyes,” he writes, and he arranged with another Jewish prisoner, Hans, to switch clothing so that Avey could infiltrate the Jewish barracks for a night and Hans could eat and rest in the British prisoners’ camp. It was a perilous ploy, but it worked, and Avey was duly horrified by the brutal conditions and life-saving mechanisms. He wrote to his mother in coded language about the camp details and to contact Ernst’s sister in England. Upon liberation, both Avey and Ernst were force-marched west, but neither knew what happened to the other. The author’s post-traumatic torment after the war—when no one wanted to listen to the truth so that the young soldier simply sealed up—underscores the importance of treatment for soldiers and prisoners.
A unique war story from a brave man.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81965-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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