The protagonists' individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.
British documentary filmmaker and journalist Harding traces the lives of Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss and Hanns Alexander, a Jewish refugee from Nazism who hunted him down and brought him to justice.
The author only learned about his great-uncle Hanns' wartime record when attending his funeral in 2006. Alexander served with British forces during World War II, refused awards for his wartime service and never told his own story. (He also swore he would never return to Germany, and he didn't.) Harding commemorates his great-uncle's life and the contributions that helped to ensure that crucial evidence was presented at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in what the New York Times described as “the crushing climax to the case.” The author traces the lives of Alexander and Höss in parallel. Alexander's family, along with other Jews, were steadily stripped of the capacity to function following Hitler's assumption of power, yet they were conflicted about leaving their homeland. Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and was later recruited into the administration of the concentration camp system by Heinrich Himmler. Höss organized the Auschwitz camps under Himmler's orders and accepted the part he was personally assigned in the Final Solution. Höss and Alexander crossed paths after the Allies liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp on April 15, 1945; it was then that Alexander became an avenging stalker of Nazi war criminals and Höss, his prey. Alexander's hunt unravels some of the background to Allied decisions about pursuing war criminals and punishing war crimes. Höss admitted to the murder of millions of Jews in interviews conducted for the war crimes tribunal and was finally executed in Poland. Harding's portrayal of both men's lives before the war sets the scene for the hunt and its aftermath.
The protagonists' individual choices and family backgrounds give this biographical history a unique, intimate quality.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1184-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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