A you-are-there portrait of the horrors of war and the incredible effect one selfless person can have on hundreds.
After discovering that his late father was a war hero, a son takes a deep dive into World War II and the terrors of the Nazi regime.
Along with Century (co-author: Hunting El Chapo, 2018, etc.), Tennessee-based pastor and first-time author Edmonds relates a fascinating war story. When the author’s daughter announced that she wanted to write a school paper on her paternal grandfather, Roddie, it startled him into realizing how little he actually knew about him. He knew from reading his father’s journals that the Nazis had captured him during battle and forced him to spend several months in brutal POW camps. Other than that, Edmonds knew very little. “His descriptions were terse,” writes the author. “Bare facts. Sometimes just fragmented sentences. Mental notes. Personal shorthand. Words clearly scribbled in haste.” Roddie had never spoken of his experiences, and Edmonds had never asked. Now, though, startled by his daughter’s plan, finding out all he could about his father became an obsession. He tracked down everyone he could find whose names were in the journals, and what they told him startled him even more: On more than one occasion, his father had saved the lives of hundreds of fellow POWs by refusing to follow Nazi officers’ orders, despite their threats to kill him if he did not. Ostensibly, the narrative—essentially a love letter from a son to his late father that is occasionally cloying—is about those two episodes, although Edmonds only devotes roughly 10 pages to them. In the bulk of the book, the author describes in chilling, horrifying detail how Nazi soldiers overran an American front line, captured thousands of GIs, forced them to march on frozen and frostbitten feet for days without food or water, and then tortured and starved them in POW camps, often leading to death.
A you-are-there portrait of the horrors of war and the incredible effect one selfless person can have on hundreds.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-290501-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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