Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.
This chillingly meticulous chronicle of a dozen escapees from a Nazi extermination camp underscores the mechanics of heroism and the fallibility of memory.
Journalist Heath, a National Magazine Award winner, ably narrates the disturbing story of the camp at Ponar, Lithuania (“never a work camp”), where 70,000 Jews were rounded up, shot, and dumped in pits, beginning in July 1941, only to be disinterred and burned to hide the evidence. Throughout, the author expertly highlights the grisly contradictions and trauma of the Holocaust. Although what happened at Ponar had been documented by the end of World War II, the story was relegated to a footnote for the next 30 years. The author masterfully resurrects the events, tracing accounts of the 12 men who miraculously escaped through a tunnel they dug at the killing pits on the night of April 15, 1944. As Heath recounts, they had been among 80 Jewish prisoners who were sent to the pit site to perform the grisly duties of digging up the decomposed corpses and burning them on towering pyres—so that, in the “magical thinking” of the Nazis, no trace of the crimes would be left as the Soviet troops advanced. However, not only did the 12 men escape and tell their stories—many not believed, though one testified at Nuremberg—but some of the inhabitants of the forest town also saw what was going on, including a journalist neighbor who documented the activity in a diary that was later found and published in 1999. Heath painstakingly sifts through the conflicting accounts over the decades, analyzing discrepancies, details, and contradictions. Ultimately, he learned, just like the survivors, “of how great the distance could be between speaking out and being heard.”
Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780805243710
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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