A powerfully written, heartbreaking account of making sure that all children have the opportunity to “dream big dreams and...
A story of UNICEF from the front lines.
Stern, the president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, recounts how she started her branch of UNICEF and was then tapped to take over the top job and almost immediately dispatched to Mozambique, where she was introduced “to the effects of severe poverty on mothers and children.” Between 2007 and 2011, she visited Mozambique, Darfur, Sierra Leone, Haiti and Kenya. She writes about the problems of expressing to people the very real pain and suffering she has discovered in these poor countries. Admirably, she personalizes and individualizes what are often presented as general problems—a woman in Mozambique, whose fourth child was her first to survive, in an earthen-floored birthing unit located a four-hour walk from her place of work. So shocking are the situations she encounters that she finds herself continually making comparisons with her own family’s Holocaust past. In Darfur, she was struck by not only the images of malnourished children, but also the “ghostlike eyes” of the women who had been through hell telling their stories of their own rapes, as well as those of their children. Equally brutal was her encounter with the maternal neonatal tetanus virus and her presence at the death of a 6-day-old infant convulsing in pain, as well as the impotence of those who knew the disease could be treated but could not stop it. “I used to regard heroes as people who had done unique, unimaginable things: saving a child’s life or standing up to a bully,” she writes. “After visiting Haiti, I decided that sometimes my heroes were people whose whole lives had been destroyed but who day after day took a breath and resolved to carry on, have faith, and pursue their dreams anew.”
A powerfully written, heartbreaking account of making sure that all children have the opportunity to “dream big dreams and have a fighting chance to realize those dreams.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02624-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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