A gripping story of overcoming adversity.
Pappert (Memories from After the War: A Stolen Youth, 2016), a German soldier during World War II, suffers but perseveres as an inmate in a Russian prison camp in this memoir.
Even though the war had ended by 1945, Pappert, a lieutenant in the German army, was still in great danger as he tried to navigate his men through hostile Czech territory and find American troops to whom they could surrender. However, the Russians, who were well-known for their brutality toward prisoners of war, eventually captured them but promised that they would transport the Germans by train into American custody. Pappert knew this was unlikely and had no choice but to consider the risky prospect of escape. However, he couldn’t find anyone inside or outside the camp to collaborate with him, so he resigned himself to his fate—an exhausting march to an overcrowded train permeated by the stench of excrement and death. Eventually, he and his men were deposited at a Russian POW camp and subjected to grueling work in mines; he sustained himself with meager rations of soup and bread, which his captors sometimes withheld as punishment. Despite being only 20 years old, Pappert was an officer, and he became both a leader and an inspiration to his men. He writes that he found both strength and solace in his unwavering Catholic faith and often tutored his fellow prisoners in prayer. Still, he admits that such bleak conditions can eventually undermine any man’s morale: “Deprived of our meager evening meal, living for weeks in this camp of terror made us into human beings that no longer really existed.” Overall, this is an affecting tale, written in a spare prose style that avoids gratuitous sentimentality. Although it’s a sequel to Pappert’s previous book, it offers a self-contained story that can be read on its own. The author’s perspective—that of a German soldier who was never committed to Nazism, but believed in a “new Germany, the Germany of Goethe, Lessing and Kant”—is a rare one, and one may wish that he’d elaborated on this particular point. However, it’s a minor quibble in an extraordinary historical record.
A gripping story of overcoming adversity.Pub Date: May 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5330-9134-5
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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