A deeply affecting addition to Holocaust literature.
A dramatic Holocaust memoir about young love and survival.
Though told in Werber's voice, the book was written by Keller (Director of Graduate Studies/Fordham Univ.; Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England, 2006). Werber's son urged Keller to interview his mother and write about her experiences of World War II. After 60 years of reticence, the Long Island–based Werber revealed the entirety of her hardships, including the loss of a first husband whose existence she had theretofore kept secret from her children. Born in Radom, Poland, at age 14 Werber was forced to live in a small Jewish ghetto. A year later she was laboring in a factory, in conditions so brutal that mistakes cost workers their lives. "We were called the armaments workers," Werber explains, "but really, we were slaves, half starving, beyond exhausted." Within a matter of months, Werber's brother was killed and her mother, grandparents and most of her aunts and uncles had been taken away. At 15, Werber fell in love with a Jewish police officer, Heniek, more than 10 years her senior, who got her a new job in a kitchen. The two married quickly in the hopes of escaping as part of a new German exchange with Argentina. Away from the ghetto when the first "exchange" happened, Werber learned that all of the German hopefuls had been shot. After witnessing many deaths, Werber survived many close calls, as well as time at Auschwitz. Liberated in 1945, Werber moved to Germany, where she met her second husband, Jack, to whom she was married until his death in 2006. Werber's story is wholly engrossing, written with exceptional immediacy and attention to detail.
A deeply affecting addition to Holocaust literature.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61039-122-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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