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THE HIDDEN CHILDREN

THE SECRET SURVIVORS OF THE HOLCAUST

Twenty-two powerful stories, recorded by Marks (a family- therapy columnist for Parents magazine), of Jewish men and women who hid from the Nazis as children—and of how this experience shaped their later lives. During the war, these Holocaust survivors tried to shed their identities by living illegally in the forbidden Christian world. In 1991, Marks, on assignment for New York magazine, attended a weekend conference in which 1600 ``hidden children'' from all over the world met for the first time. In Nazi-occupied Europe, there were about 1.6 million Jewish children, she tells us. By 1945, about 1.5 million had been killed—a death rate that runs ahead of that of Jews in general, probably because, as is generally believed, the Nazis considered the annihilation of Jewish children to be of primary importance. Some children, however, survived by disguising themselves as Christians and hiding—often without their families, and often forced to live in sewers, huts, barns, and woods. ``We had a common bond. We had grown up, but we had lost our childhood,'' remembers one survivor. ``To this day, I don't know how to ride a bike, and I'm not the only one,'' says another. Forced to be endlessly adaptable, the children found as adults that the same resources that had allowed them to survive as children had now become liabilities: ``Adaptability became alienation and a loss of identity. The ability to live with homelessness became an inability to feel safe, or close to loved ones.'' Or: ``I am never myself because I spent all those years being someone else: peroxide hair and genuflecting every time I passed a church.'' Nearly all the survivors, we learn, have been silent about the past: ``Whenever the subject of the war came up, I minimized what I'd gone through...nobody wanted to listen.'' A painstaking record of atrocities, the will to survive no matter what, and the price paid for that survival.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-449-90685-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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