Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word.
A book that no one would ever want to write proves powerfully, painfully difficult to read.
One of the many casualties of the November 2015 terrorist attack on concertgoers at the Bataclan Theater in Paris was Leiris’ young wife, the mother of their 17-month-old son. His grief transcends any attempt at literary criticism, but his craft as a journalist allows him to focus on detail and avoid the bathos of sentimentality, thus allowing his shellshocked horror to stand on its own. The narrative is written like diary entries, fresh with emotional immediacy, beginning with reports of the attack while he was at home, waiting for his wife’s return. Then come his responses, and his responses to other responses, as he comes to terms with his belief that dwelling on hating the perpetrators is not the way to keep his wife alive for him and his son. “People ask me if I’ve forgotten or forgiven,” he writes. “I forgive nothing, I forget nothing. I am not getting over anything, and certainly not so quickly. When everyone else has gone back to his or her life, we will still be living with this. This is our story. To refuse it would be to betray it.” The fulcrum of the narrative (which spans just under two weeks) is an open letter to the terrorists, posted on Facebook, where he writes, “I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you….You have failed. I will not change.” It’s a complex response to a tragic loss, and while it would be minimizing his loss and grief to call the book cathartic, it is certainly part of a response that allows him to conclude, “today, the funeral procession is over. It is toward our new life that we walk.”
Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2211-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
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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