A moving memoir and a testament to good fortune.
A survivor’s tale.
The daughter of a distinguished lawyer, Lasker-Wallfisch opens her memoir with chatty family letters and her father’s painful, futile efforts to arrange emigration from Germany in the 1930s. As the persecution of Jews grew, her parents were deported in 1942; her grandmother was also taken away. “The destination was unknown; they were never heard of again,” the late British historian Martin Gilbert writes in the book’s preface. Still adolescents, Lasker-Wallfisch and her sister, Renate, planned to escape by train to France but were arrested. Released from prison in 1943, the author was sent to Auschwitz, where she escaped the ovens by knowing how to play a musical instrument. “I would like to remind whoever may read this that I had not seen, let alone touched, a cello for nearly two years at the moment I am describing,” she writes. “I seem to remember that I played—or tried to play—the slow movement of the Boccherini Concerto. When I had finished, I sat down and joined the camp orchestra. There was no real danger of my not passing the audition, for up to the moment of my arrival the orchestra had not had a single bass instrument.” In 1944, as the Red Army neared, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen. “Here people were starving,” she writes. “Here was typhus. Here was dirt, lice, no hygiene, no ambulance, no medicines. For fourteen days we stayed without bread. Rations were beets with water without salt.” Liberation arrived in 1945—“the liberation we had hoped for for three years.” Initially denied entry to Britain, Lasker-Wallfisch eventually succeeded. She went on to enjoy a long, successful career in music. “I have never regretted for one moment that I came to England to start my new life,” she writes. “I have made my home here, and I have a great deal to be thankful for.”
A moving memoir and a testament to good fortune.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9780571402410
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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