A grim and gripping story of survival in a most egregious time.
A detailed, horrifying, and ultimately hopeful account of a young Jewish man’s efforts to avoid the Nazis in one of their principal cities.
Thankfully, Bert Lewyn, who died in 2016, had the good fortune to have family who cared about his remarkable story. Through interviews, travels, and archival research, his son and daughter-in-law, who worked as a researcher at CNN, compiled and edited this account (first self-published in 2001) of his wartime evasions during his teen years. In one of history’s darkest periods, the author suffered profoundly—separated from his parents, he never saw them again—and endured unspeakable deprivations. But he also benefitted from some courageous Berliners who hid him, fed him, and gave him hope. Lewyn was a technically skilled young man, proficient at metalworking and other machine skills, and these capacities enabled him not only to find occasional work—including for the Nazis themselves—but to escape from Nazi custody. He stayed with friends or slept in bombed-out buildings or in the countryside. But the Nazis eventually nabbed him, and the author provides a harrowing account of a prison break through an underground tunnel, an escape made possible by his knowledge of locks and keys. In addition to the grief he expresses for the loss of his parents, he tells about his quick marriage to a young mother. It was a marriage that helped them both survive but one that could not endure. The compiler and editor have done their best to enliven the narrative with verbatim dialogue and information derived from their journeys to key sites in Lewyn’s story. They write that they have endeavored to verify everything that’s still possible to verify, and their extensive backmatter and photographs of places and significant documents testify to their considerable efforts—and to their fidelity.
A grim and gripping story of survival in a most egregious time.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64160-110-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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