An inspiring story of courage rendered through impressive personal and historical detail.
A deeply sympathetic account of a group of concentration-camp dorm mates who stayed in touch years after their release.
Of the 50 or so girls who met in Room 28, only 15 survived, and ten tell their affecting stories here. Located just north of Prague, Theresienstadt (Terezin) was used by the invading Nazi forces primarily as a transit station for prisoners headed for extermination farther east, as well as a so-called model camp with a self-governing Council of Elders that the Nazis could show the outside world as evidence of their fair treatment of the Jews. In fact, the SS ran it, easily duping the outsiders. The Jewish girls, ages 11 to 14, were wrenched from their family from various parts of what the Wehrmacht had set up as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Often sickly and traumatized, they were grouped in Room 28, and soon began a difficult work routine and endured an unappetizing diet, bedbugs and epidemics such as typhoid and encephalitis. However, the youthful spirit of hope could not be extinguished even in the cruelest conditions. Through the diaries and notebooks the girls kept, as well as later personal accounts, Berlin-based journalist Brenner reveals the extraordinary means the girls and their caretakers took to share food and comfort and help each other. The author also chronicles the remarkable artistic experiments undertaken by the girls, especially their enthusiastic production of the children’s opera Brundibár.
An inspiring story of courage rendered through impressive personal and historical detail.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4244-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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