Because of the variety of the author’s experiences and the power of their expression here, if you could only read one...
Ably translated, this is an extraordinary Holocaust memoir wherein a young Czech woman undergoes a dizzying variety of hellish experiences.
Published in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume is a clinic on the varieties of torture that one could undergo as a Jew during the Nazi period. Young Ruth was steeled for loss early in life as a child of divorced parents. This girl who enjoyed music and skiing soon found herself in a long line of Jews delivering all valuables (especially money, jewelry, musical instruments, and radios) to the new Gestapo authorities. The family managed to hide out on a farm with gentiles for many months, but their resources ran out and the Gestapo closed in, forcing the family to the camp Theresienstadt, where conditions were occasionally livable thanks to periodic visits by the Red Cross. But inmates suffered all the more when their meager calorie allotment dropped back to starvation level. To her credit, young Ruth volunteered as a nurse, even though her duties required more removal of corpses than relieving anyone’s suffering. While bedridden herself with fever, she married her ghetto policeman boyfriend. Elias, soon pregnant, was then transferred to Auschwitz, where pregnancy was a certain death sentence. Her attending physician turned out to be none other than the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who spared her life because he wanted to see how long an unfed baby could live. The most pathetic lines in this moving memoir are a soliloquy by this young mother who must kill her newborn for a chance of survival: “My child...you can’t even whimper anymore.” Elias is ultimately tapped for forced labor, allowing her to survive to see the Third Reich crumble and eventually begin a family in Palestine.
Because of the variety of the author’s experiences and the power of their expression here, if you could only read one Holocaust memoir—this should be the one.Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-471-16365-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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