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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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