A Holocaust testament of heart-rending immediacy.
A survivor of industrialized genocide describes the housekeeping details and the management of business in a Nazi death camp.
There were, of course, many concentration camps that worked prisoners to death in Poland and elsewhere. Treblinka, where Rajchman (who died in 2004) survived for more than a year, was a little different. It was established only to kill Jews and other undesirables. The author was selected to sort valuables and clothing of the dead—early on he found his younger sister’s dress—and he carried the remains of the victims, body parts intermingled, to mass graves. The cadavers of small children were dismissed as “trinkets” by their murderers. Pitchforks supplemented earth-moving equipment to transfer disintegrating corpses. Rajchman lived because he worked as a “barber” and then as a “dentist,” shearing the heads of those on the way to the gas chambers and plucking gold from their teeth. It was grueling, noxious employment. On busy days, the camp could eliminate as many as 10,000 with efficiency. Methods were regularly improved and systems upgraded, all under the sportive supervision of some 100 SS men and about 150 Ukrainian henchmen. In Treblinka, life and death merged; illness was not tolerated; there were many suicides. Still, Rajchman had the supernatural will to survive and to bear witness. The author wrote this book in Yiddish in 1945, within a few months after the workers’ revolt and his escape from the camp, and he lived to give evidence against “Ivan the Terrible,” one of the most notorious of the guards at Treblinka. Rajchman’s searing story, frequently narrated in the present tense, has a powerful authenticity and should not be forgotten.
A Holocaust testament of heart-rending immediacy.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60598-139-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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