In a vividly narrated reexamination of the historical record, Zuccotti (History/Barnard; Italians and the Holocaust, 1987) tells the horrifying story of the fate of French Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators. With its egalitarian legacy from the French Revolution, France was traditionally one of Europe's most enlightened societies in extending civil rights to Jews. But beneath this tradition, Zuccotti says, lay a deeper, more ancient one of anti-Semitism, which surfaced in modern times during the Dreyfus affair (1895) and at other moments of crisis for France. After its fall to Germany in 1940, France was divided into an occupied zone and the nominally independent Vichy Republic. In both regions, Zuccotti says, French bureaucrats and police cooperated with the Nazis in implementing laws to identify and segregate Jews—with French police, for example, interning Jews in camps established by Vichy officials in the unoccupied zone. In policies that affected both French and foreign Jews, the Nazis—with official French assistance—rounded up thousands in the occupied zone: Zuccotti emphasizes the terrifying roundup in Paris on July 16, 1942, which began the systematic deportation and destruction of Jews in France. By autumn 1942, those interned in the Vichy Republic were being delivered on a large scale to the Nazis. The author records disparate French attitudes toward the arrests, ranging from indifference or malicious satisfaction to sympathy and support for the victims. Indeed, French apathy (which contrasted with widespread, active anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe) may have been responsible for the relatively high survival rate (76 percent) of Jews in France. Zuccotti also dwells on the courage of relief organizations and of individual Protestant and Catholic workers (as opposed to many in the Church hierarchy, who supported Vichy) who hid and sheltered thousands throughout the country. A balanced yet heartrending contribution to Holocaust literature.
Pub Date: July 14, 1993
ISBN: 0-465-03034-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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