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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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