Donda’s captivating account of her surreal role in pulling back the curtain on one of the darkest periods of Argentine...
The youngest member of the Argentine National Congress reveals the gruesome story of her uncle’s involvement in her birth parents’ murder, her kidnapping and adoption and the shock waves the truth created in her life.
Born in captivity in a military prison to a mother she never knew, Donda chronicles the painful discovery of her true identity. At the age of 27, the author learned that she was the daughter of one of the “disappeared,” one of “the thirty thousand people who were kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed” by the military dictatorship beginning in the 1970s. Analía, as she was known, always perceived a gulf between herself and the couple she knew as her parents. “From my earliest years, I’ve had a rebellious, contentious nature that was diametrically opposed to that of the man and woman who raised me whom I believed to be my parents,” writes the author. At an early age, Donda became active in social-justice movements and helping the poor. As her political commitments deepened during the ’90s, the author rebelled against the right-wing ideology of her middle-class suburban parents. When she learned the identities of her real parents and how they died, she was forced to confront the truth: “I was thus raised in a brazen lie, knowing nothing of my true roots and loving the very people who benefited from the tragic fate of my real parents.” Donda deftly leads readers through Argentina’s Byzantine history of guerrilla groups, dictatorships, coups and military policies, providing a solid foundation for understanding the political and social upheavals underpinning her story. As “the first baby stolen by the military to play an official role in the political life of her country,” the author serves as a witness to its horrific past and its hopeful future.
Donda’s captivating account of her surreal role in pulling back the curtain on one of the darkest periods of Argentine history merits a wide readership.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-404-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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