A group memoir by younger Holocaust survivors, as assembled by one of the period's premier historians. At first it seems unsettling to flit from the recollections of one young Polish or Hungarian Holocaust survivor to another. But because Gilbert (The Holocaust, 1986; The Day the War Ended, 1995; etc.) has done such a superb job of weaving together the memories of some 730 children (predominantly boys) who survived the war and were rehabilitated in Britain, we get an effective overview of the experience of the Holocaust. Some of the stark details of the memories speak volumes: A mother, selected for death by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, turns to her panicked offspring with the austere words, ``Let us say goodbye, my children.'' These recollections of events and people are also historically significant and fresh. The diversity of the many voices offers a considerable range of experience. For example, did ``the boys'' (as they called themselves) turn to vengeance when the eleventh-hour death marches, the beatings, the executions, the starvation, finally ended in liberation by American troops? Yes and no. Michael Etkind pointed out escaping SS men to American troops and pleaded, ``Boom, boom.'' In contrast, when Jack Rubinfeld was confronted with a German woman with children who hadn't eaten in a day, he shared his stash of bread with them. Descriptions of the slow rehabilitation of the children in British facilities takes up the final third of the book, and this material is unique and particularly powerful: It took a while for some of the boys to learn how to wait for their food and not vault over the table to seize it. It took even longer to rekindle self-confidence. Dr. Fridolin Moritz Max Friedmann, himself an ÇmigrÇ and a skilled educator who headed a British residence devoted to easing the boys back into the world, noted that ``the habit of hope is still so new to them.'' A uniquely effective addition to Holocaust literature. (40 b&w photos, 8 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4402-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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