A remarkable tale, dramatically affecting and historically significant.
Two sisters recount their terrifying experience in Auschwitz and their extraordinary survival.
Ruth and Manci Grunberger were both born in the 1920s in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, a small city at the base of the Carpathian Mountains. They lived a quiet, happy life free from any visible antisemitism and in a community that was largely isolated from the gathering storms that threatened Europe. That life changed once their land was annexed by Hungary in 1938. As Jews, they were forced to wear yellow stars, their father’s store was confiscated, and they were ejected from their home and forced to live in the Jewish ghetto. When the Germans arrived, they were sent on cattle cars to Auschwitz; Manci ruefully remembers it as “my life’s black day.” The sisters’ experiences were gruesome. Ruth puts it poignantly: “All the horrors that had been told were true. These innocent people, just off the trains, were being gassed to death and their lifeless bodies taken to the ovens and burned—the flames, the thick smoke, the heavy dust particles and the putrid odors were from bodies. Somehow, I managed to get back to the barracks. I was in shock and was screaming, ‘I know! I know everything!’ ” Seymour, the son-in-law of Manci, intelligently facilities the telling of the sad but ultimately inspiring tale. The entire Grunberger family was sent to Auschwitz, and Ruth and Manci were the only survivors, but their book is not a lamentation—they both managed to make their way to the United States following the war and start afresh. Of course, this is ground well covered in scholarly and literary terms, though the perspectives of women, particularly those subjected to the “death marches” in 1945, aren’t widely represented. This is a profoundly moving story courageously told, one that reveals the heights and depths of human possibility.
A remarkable tale, dramatically affecting and historically significant.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-9-49323-189-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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