A heartbreaking memoir that honors the legacy of survivors.
Indescribable tragedy births love, resilience, and discovery in this historical memoir detailing one family’s escape from Germany in the 1930s.
The sheer massive number of those killed in the Holocaust can “obscure the reality that embedded within these numbers are individuals—people who loved someone and were loved by someone else.” In this historical memoir, Scheidt aims to “open space for, and hear, the voices that rehumanize the experience of those who have been victimized by and survived genocide and mass atrocity.” In 1988, after his mother’s death, the author discovered a box of letters and other family papers saved from the war years. The contents of the box led to Scheidt’s decade-long examination of his family’s perilous journey to freedom. The story begins with Bruno Scheidt—the author’s beloved and brave father—who was accused, in a Gestapo record, of “stealing commercial secrets” and “was transformed from a well-established businessman in his native city to a refugee fleeing for his life.” As the Nazi Party closed in, Bruno left his family and the “love of his life,” Suse Ballin, for the promise of freedom in France. With the assistance of Kat Rohrer, a filmmaker and the descendant of a Nazi officer, Charlie Scheidt follows his family’s peregrinations through Germany, France, Holland, and New York City. Along the way, the author felt closer to not only his parents, but also to his lost aunts, uncles, and grandparents and a period of history that transformed the world. Scheidt honors his family, and the countless families lost to the tragedy of the Holocaust, with his reflective prose and insightful revelations. The contemporary and historical narratives are evenly paced, well researched, and thoughtfully paralleled; the author grants “meaning to the loss and suffering” to each victim and survivor. Scheidt’s story is an important one, full of powerful history, life, loss, and, above all else, hope.
A heartbreaking memoir that honors the legacy of survivors.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781978846746
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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