Captures both tragic events and beautiful images that continue to haunt the author after more than 60 years.
Gripping memoir of a Polish family that escaped the Nazi liquidation of Jews by living in sewers for 14 months.
Assisted by veteran co-author Paisner (Last Man Down: A Firefighter’s Story of Survival and Escape from the World Trade Center, 2002, etc.), Chiger begins her story with short, colorful childhood memories of idyllic life in prewar Lvov: “Like a princess. That is how I grew up, like a character from a storybook fable.” With the Nazi invasion on September 1, 1939, however, everything in four-year-old Krystyna’s life unraveled. Under the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, at first the Soviets ruled eastern Poland, including Lvov. They nationalized her parents’ textile shop and forced the family to take additional residents into its spacious apartment, but things were “mostly okay.” But not after Hitler declared war on Russia in June 1941, and the Nazis occupied all of Poland. They used Ukrainian soldiers to terrorize and persecute Lvov’s 150,000 Jews; theft, destruction of Jewish businesses, systematic forced labor and murder became everyday experiences. Chiger’s father Ignacy had one goal: to keep his family safe. To that end he unashamedly employed guile and bribes; even his expert carpentry skills came in handy to construct secret spaces in which his daughter and son could hide during “liquidation actions.” When Nazis invaded Lvov’s Jewish ghetto for a final “action” in May 1943, the Chiger family and five other Jews descended into the city’s filthy sewers to hide. They were helped by a Catholic sewer worker who saw their salvation as a means of atoning for his early life as a criminal. Lively prose deftly describes the smell, the pitch-dark, the cold, the rats and the harrowing fear of being discovered by Nazis. Through it all, Ignacy Chiger’s ever-present sense of humor kept his family strong.
Captures both tragic events and beautiful images that continue to haunt the author after more than 60 years.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37656-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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