A lamentably familiar, chilling reminder of the depths to which humans can sink.
A survivor of the Holocaust chronicles his horrific experiences in the “barbed-wire hell” of Auschwitz.
A Dutch physician, de Wind was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and was alive when the Red Army arrived in 1945. He stayed at the camp, working as a doctor for the other survivors and writing this book. It was published in the Netherlands in 1946 but nowhere else, so this is its first appearance in English. Readers who assume that victims marched directly from the trains to the gas chambers will quickly learn that many had to endure numerous other awful crimes before they were executed. Auschwitz was not one but a series of huge camps, only one of which contained the crematoriums. An estimated 1.3 million were sent there, and about 83% died. The author begins with his train ride from a Dutch camp. Prisoners were locked in an ordinary freight car with a bucket for a toilet and no food or water for a trip that lasted three days, sometimes longer. Upon arrival, all luggage and valuables were confiscated; children, the aged, and the infirm were often immediately gassed. Jews capable of working as well as non-Jews were stripped naked, shaved, sprayed with disinfectant, ordered to choose clothes from a pile taken from dead prisoners, and packed into overcrowded barracks. Most worked in mines, quarries, heavy construction, or factories, many operated by long-established Germany companies. The conditions were barbaric: The diet, which consisted of about 1,500 calories per day, according to the author, could not sustain even a sedentary person, so most died after a few months, and their skeletal bodies were burned. Auschwitz contained a few privileged institutions such as a hospital, food preparation facilities, and warehouses; prisoners assigned in these areas had a greater chance of surviving. That included the author, who delivers a harrowing account that contains the same horrors, unspeakable behavior, suffering, and occasional humanity revealed in other concentration camp memoirs.
A lamentably familiar, chilling reminder of the depths to which humans can sink.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8575-2683-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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