“When I think about that period, I feel resentful and happy at the same time,” writes Rehbein; likewise, readers will...
Rehbein recalls the dreadful World War II years, and a few thereafter, of a German youth living in Poland.
As 1939 approached, Rehbein’s family toiled in a German farming village set amidst Ukrainian farming villages situated in Poland. As German Lutherans, they were retributive targets of the Polish government in those fraught years, and paid the price for German nationalism and bellicosity. Rehbein’s agricultural village may have been set in flowering meadows, but his voice displays a foreboding, fearful innocence of the time: “You know that if the Polish government were treating the German minority better, the thoughts of disloyalty would not need to be there.” Then the great hammer came down, and there was little but death to turn to, other than black humor, as the author was forced to resettle to the north: “Everybody had to learn how to say ‘Heil Hitler,’ and we heil hitlered a lot.” Rehbein had an intuitive distaste for injustice, and that found him on the dire end of brutality–being beaten, for instance, with a thorny stick while on the edge of starvation. It also allowed him an immediacy of recall, to remember with bitterness the everyday: “These screams were only interrupted by the pitch of their voices changing while they were being slapped or raped.” The author found solace in his possessions: a teakettle and two dirty shirts. There comes a moment when readers will think that Rehbein has simply let everything loose–“being picked for execution can be extremely unnerving”–only to have him reel them back into the soul-wasting, daily routine of a civilian prisoner of war in a Russian slave-labor camp. Still, the book contains what can only be called instances of salvation, such as Rehbein’s reunion with his parents after the war, and times of biblical wandering–“my sojourning in the bombed-out and defeated Germany.”
“When I think about that period, I feel resentful and happy at the same time,” writes Rehbein; likewise, readers will appreciate these honest accounts.Pub Date: May 26, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-4196-3341-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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