A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.
Companion volume to the upcoming Ken Burns’ PBS documentary about an American couple who rescued people threatened by the Nazi whirlwind in Europe.
Readers familiar with Burns’ documentaries will recognize some of his techniques transferred here into text by writer Joukowsky (co-director of the film), who first approached Burns about this story featuring his grandparents, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, a story Joukowsky had thoroughly researched and already begun to film. There are passages quoted from correspondence between the two, touching intimate moments, mentions of myriads of documents, photographs, and interviews (which readers must wait for PBS to see), and follow-ups on the principals and some supporting players. Waitstill was a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts when, in 1939, the American Unitarian Association recruited the couple to go to Prague to aid those under imminent Nazi threat. The Sharps succeeded in astonishing fashion, helping people slip out of the country, feeding the hungry, avoiding ubiquitous Nazi surveillance, and rescuing children from utter poverty. There were many near misses, and many moments of frustration, fear, and labyrinthine bureaucracy á la Dickens’ Bleak House. There are also some surprises. They helped the son of Thomas Mann escape; Harvard’s Jerome Bruner supported Martha during her subsequent run for Congress. The author generally adopts a neutral narrative tone, though he does blast Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long (“anti-Semitic, xenophobic”), and a couple of times he notes the irony of the Sharps spending so much time away from their own children to go abroad to help others’ children. But the author’s portraits are generally flattering, even when he chronicles the couple’s divorce. True tension, though, is hard to create when we know from the outset that both survived the war.
A clear, unpretentious volume that justly celebrates a couple who risked all for others.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7182-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
