“War always smells the same—diesel oil and dust tinged with sadness,” Babchenko reflects. A harrowing, masterfully written...
Apocalypse Now? The guys on the boat had it easy, as this memoir from the Chechnya front demonstrates within a few sentences.
Drafted into the military at 18 during the regime of Boris Yeltsin, “a despotic leader [who] couldn’t have cared less about individuals,” Babchenko was quickly shipped off to the Northern Caucasus, not long after the war there began. His introduction to the hells of war came in the form of having to drink corpse-tainted water—no surprise, however, given the way the corpses were piling up. As Babchenko notes, in a single engagement, the Battle of Grozny, nearly 5,000 Russians died, while the Chechen losses were beyond counting. The water was the least of his problems, for as a draftee he was regularly beaten and robbed, if less so than a Jewish comrade, “puny, cultured Zyuzik . . . [who] takes the beatings particularly badly…he still can’t get used to the fact that he is a non-person, a lowlife, a dumb animal, and every punch sends him into a depression.” Forced to raid civilians and each other for food, Babchenko’s unit lacked any visible structure. Weeks passed before he was even aware that he had a commanding officer, and all around him his fellow soldiers were being picked off by guerrillas or running away in the hope of making it alive to Russia again. “Even our lieutenant, who was called up for two years after he graduated from college, did a runner,” writes Babchenko. The indignities and ironies continued to mount. Only after they had been in combat for months did the army get around to issuing dog tags to identify the Russian dead, thin little pieces of aluminum that disintegrate in no time: “If you roast in a carrier they’ll just melt and no one will be able to identify you.” Consequently, there evolved a thriving black-market trade in iron dog tags—and pot, trying to score some of which leads Babchenko into a dangerous misadventure.
“War always smells the same—diesel oil and dust tinged with sadness,” Babchenko reflects. A harrowing, masterfully written tale that, like Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, bears promise of becoming a classic of modern war reportage.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1860-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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