A capable investigation of a little-known aspect of World War II history.
Historical study of an overlooked hero of the Holocaust.
When Poland was occupied during World War II, its legitimate government went into exile. That government posted diplomats who were sometimes recognized, sometimes not, with the Reich momentarily placated by the naming of one, Aleksander Ładoś (1891-1963), not as ambassador but as a temporary chargé d’affaires to Switzerland. “A former journalist and diplomat,” writes Moorhouse, author of Poland 1939 and Berlin at War, “Ładoś had served in a number of significant diplomatic posts through the 1920s and ’30s.” Ładoś had a widespread network of contacts who pulled together, once it became clear that Poland’s Jews would be in the vanguard of victims of the rapidly developing Shoah, to find ways to deliver at least some of them to safety. They did so by securing doctored passports and visas, most from Latin American countries and then delivering them to a lucky few. On that note, Moorhouse estimates that the “Ładoś Group” issued passports and other identity documents to somewhere between 8,300 and 11,400 people (the discrepancy comes from the fact that passports sometimes covered whole families and not just individuals). Less than half are known to have survived, since passport holders were often transferred from death camps to “internment camps” where they were subject to starvation and disease. Moorhouse writes circumspectly of sensitive subjects such as how choices were made as to who would receive the forged papers. He also notes that corruption figured in the larger enterprise of document forgery, with some characters outside the group selling documents at a premium. While Moorhouse allows that other groups were active along the same lines—one Polish underground organization “produced some fifty thousand forged documents, on average around one hundred every day”—he makes clear that the forgotten Ładoś deserves to be remembered, as do his lieutenants.
A capable investigation of a little-known aspect of World War II history.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781541619852
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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