An important addition to Holocaust studies, evoking the small band of survivors who remembered.
A scholarly, nuanced micro history of a Nazi slave-labor camp.
Browning (History/Univ. of North Carolina; The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942) systematically relates how the Jews of Wierzbnik became the property of the SS, slaves who were rented out as laborers in the neighboring camp of Starachowice. Despite the humiliations, physical abuse, bondage and murder, the war-supply camp was, for a while, a haven for those with work papers. Then there was the local killing Aktion one day in October 1942, and, though the destruction of Nazi human property might have been against state interest, there were many wanton shootings just for sport. A few comparatively decent overseers notwithstanding, the Jews faced the brutal police chief Walter Becker (who was acquitted of war crimes in 1972), the dangerous Ukrainian guards and the Polish partisans. Ultimately, thousands of Jews were transported by rail from Starachowice to Auschwitz-Birkenau for extermination. Browning methodically narrates the tale on a survivor-by-survivor basis. His trenchant, relentless exposition shows how the camp was truly exceptional in its evil efficiency. The text is all the more powerful because the author avoids dramatization or overwrought polemics. A coda describes the rigged postwar trial of Becker and the egregious miscarriage of justice that outraged the author and provoked his study.
An important addition to Holocaust studies, evoking the small band of survivors who remembered.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-07019-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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