A tale of resourcefulness outside the death camps—and another worthy addition to the still burgeoning literature of the...
Hungarian lawyer Soros (father of financier George Soros) describes the endurance of the Jews in wartime Budapest in his memoir (which was first published—in Esperanto—in 1965).
If you want to know what makes George Soros (and his brother Paul) tick, the clues are to be found in the story told here by their father, a thoughtful man of the world who eluded annihilation by adapting the techniques of animal mimicry. He split the family into separate residences and, with the use of false papers certifying their Christianity, enabled them to become invisible by taking on the coloration of their surroundings. A thoroughly secular Jew, Soros acted independently, disdaining the Jewish Council as a collaborative entity sponsored by murderers. He became, when necessary, a retailer of forged documents. The eventual advent of the infamous Arrow Cross regime (the native Hungarian version of Nazism) brought on a particularly evil turn of events: Soros witnessed the slaughter of multitudes of fellow Jews—men, women, and children—by various methods (including drownings in the not-quite-beautiful, not-quite-blue Danube), but he also saw occasional spontaneous acts of true generosity, which were all the more remarkable due to their infrequency. His recollections, related simply and directly, are narrated with an occasional mordant wit. Disguised as gentile, for example, the author sometimes distributed cigarettes and other provisions to Jews hiding out of sight—and he remarks that, in these instances at least, “the Jews got to see that there were still a few decent Christians.” Many of his people, of course, could never have passed themselves off as Christians (and some, no doubt, would have looked upon the very attempt as a betrayal), but Soros saw that there was only one way in which he could thwart the Nazis—by surviving.
A tale of resourcefulness outside the death camps—and another worthy addition to the still burgeoning literature of the Holocaust. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-581-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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