Occupation as recorded by the victims—an often depressing yet useful historical document.
A collection of firsthand accounts of wartime experiences in the Netherlands.
After the 1945 liberation, Dutch officials, anxious to document what happened during the war, pled publicly for writing, which resulted in an avalanche of several thousand journals and letters now housed at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. With few exceptions, such as Anne Frank’s diary, they possess little literary value, but journalist Siegal’s excerpts provide a vivid portrait of the daily lives of “victims and collaborators, bystanders and participants.” Three of her leading diarists were Jews, two enthusiastic Dutch Nazis, one a member of the resistance, and one a teenager with no political views. She also includes shorter dispatches from a dozen others. Hitler considered Holland a quasi-Nordic nation, so, after the bloody 1940 conquest, Nazi occupation was relatively benign. During the first year, there were anti-German demonstrations and strikes to protest German exactions, and when local antisemitic gangs began their attacks, many young Christian men fought alongside Jews. Matters settled down once the Nazi grip tightened, whereupon, although there was a modest resistance, most citizens and police cooperated in handing over Jews. When it became clear that the Nazis intended to kill them, about 15% went into hiding. Ultimately, 75% of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were killed in five years. Nazi policy deteriorated in the fall of 1944, when the Dutch welcomed the failed Allied invasion. Food deliveries were stopped, and a famine followed; thousands died of starvation. Siegal’s emphasis on the Holocaust makes for painful reading, but these are private writings, so much of the text records repetitious, day-to-day concerns, some of which readers may skim. Fortunately, the author steps in frequently to summarize events and describe her own life (she is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors), and she concludes with an insightful account of how postwar Holland recalled the experience, a section that includes a surprising number of interviews with survivors and their descendants.
Occupation as recorded by the victims—an often depressing yet useful historical document.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780063070653
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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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