“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 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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