Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.
A former inmate of the concentration camp that provided slave labor to Oskar Schindler’s factory informatively recounts the compilation of the businessman’s famous list.
Pemper, who offered key assistance to Schindler in saving the lives of several hundred Jews during the Holocaust, begins by chronicling his childhood in Kraków. It was always an anti-Semitic city, but not until the Nazi occupation of Poland did life for its Jewish residents become intolerable. Chapters on the maneuverings and deception required just to survive during those dark days are stark and dramatic, though similar to those in many other memoirs about the period. What makes the book stand out are the author’s harrowing descriptions of life at the Plaszów concentration camp and his work there. Chosen by camp commandant Amon Göth to be his typist and personal secretary, Pemper’s translation skills and administrative abilities protected him from much of the cruelty inflicted on inmates. He had extensive exposure, however, to the barbaric treatment of others and was later a key witness at Göth’s trial for war crimes. Through the commandant, Pemper came to know Schindler, who used camp personnel in his weapons business. The author lavishly praises Schindler’s humane efforts to rescue his employees and their families, but goes to great length not to deify his friend and savior. Schindler “certainly didn’t come to Kraków as a rescuer,” Pemper writes. “He came as a businessman. But when he saw what was going on in Poland, and how the occupiers were treating us, he decided to do something about it.” Though the author admires Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award–winning film version of Schindler’s List, he details instances in which the director changed facts to make the 1993 film more dramatic. Schindler did not dictate the list of people he wanted from memory as he did in the movie, for example, nor did he show up at Göth’s villa with a suitcase full of cash.
Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-286-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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