The name of Auschwitz has become synonymous with the Holocaust and so it is fitting that an entire volume be devoted to describing what happened there. Scrupulously documented, this is short, but packs a lot of information. For this subject, a picture really is worth a thousand words and Lawton carefully lays out the evidence as if with an eye towards the deniers, about which a chapter is included. He uses only the most conservative estimates for the number of people killed at Auschwitz and explains how it is that estimates can be made when the bodies of the victims were burned to smoke and ash and the Germans took such pains to destroy the evidence. Each two-page spread has its own chapter heading, among them “The Transports,” “The Gas Chambers,” and “Burning the Bodies.” A well laid-out combination of text, archival photographs, maps, diagrams of the camp, and survivor testimony provides a many-faceted perspective. Lawton succeeds in conveying the single-minded, machine-like efficiency with which the Germans approached the “final solution” for the “Jewish problem.” Disturbing photographs are included—as they must be if the truth is to be told—of piles of dead bodies, a skeletal girl who was a victim of medical experimentation, naked, emaciated men whose private parts are hidden by text, and an inmate who threw himself against the electric fence, a suicide. The jacket-cover text notes that ordinary people helped carry out the evil perpetrated at Auschwitz and asks: “How did it happen?” While Auschwitz doesn’t answer the question of how this could happen, it certainly captures the horror of what did happen. Gut-wrenching, this will be invaluable to anyone seeking to educate children and young adults. (Nonfiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7636-1595-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Just in time for the millennium comes this adaptation of Jennings and Brewster’s The Century (1998). Still a browsable, coffee-table edition, the book divides the last 100 years more or less by decade, with such chapter headings as “Shell Shock,” “Global Nightmare,” and “Machine Dreams.” A sweeping array of predominantly black-and-white photographs documents the story in pictures—from Theodore Roosevelt to O.J., the Panama Canal to the crumbling Berlin Wall, the dawn of radio to the rise of Microsoft—along with plenty of captions and brief capsules of historical events. Setting this volume apart, and making it more than just a glossy textbook overview of mega-events, are blue sidebars that chronicle the thoughts, actions, and attitudes of ordinary men, women, and children whose names did not appear in the news. These feature-news style interviews feature Milt Hinton on the Great Migration, Betty Broyles on a first automobile ride, Sharpe James on the effect of Jackie Robinson’s success on his life, Clara Hancox on growing up in the Depression, Marnie Mueller on life as an early Peace Corps volunteer, and more. The authors define the American century by “the inevitability of change,” a theme reflected in the selection of photographs and interviews throughout wartime and peacetime, at home and abroad. While global events are included only in terms of their impact on Americans, this portfolio of the century is right for leafing through or for total immersion. (index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32708-0
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)
In 1943, motherless 12-year-old Eva, her sickly older sister Rachel, and their Papa are forced by the Germans, who have
occupied their Polish town, Bezdin, to live in the Jewish ghetto. Papa knows their lives are in danger and worries what will happen to his girls if he is killed or sent to a death camp. Then one day, as Rachel is walking to their aunt’s apartment for a visit, the soldiers raid the ghetto and carry her off. Weeks pass, and Papa finally hears that she is alive in a labor camp in Czechoslovakia. Since conditions in the ghetto worsen daily and the raids increase in frequency, Papa begs the Nazi official for whom he works to send Eva to join Rachel in Parschnitz; miraculously, his request is granted. At the camp, conditions are terrible—there is little water and practically no food, and the inmates are forced to work 18 hours a day at jobs that are not only difficult but extremely dangerous. Eva, for example, works on spinning machines, where she must keep lint from clogging the machinery by reaching into the moving mechanism. The girls grow weaker by the day, and their worries are compounded by two things: their uncertainty about the fate of Papa the ever-present chance that they will be chosen to board the trains that leave each day for the death camps. While the book is fiction, the author has based it on the life of her own mother-in-law, who survived in the camps even as her sister did. Every word of this radical change for Isaacs (Swamp Angel, 1994, etc.) rings as true as any first-person story told by an actual survivor, giving young readers another powerful testament to the horrors of the
Holocaust. (Fiction 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-590-60363-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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