This compelling material might be even more powerfully disturbing had it been accompanied by additional explanatory and...
Horrific childhood testimonies by survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.
These 30 brief narratives were collected by Pran from now-adult survivors of Pol Pot's killing fields. Most of those included here currently reside in the US. Pran, a photojournalist whose story was featured in the movie The Killing Fields, is the founder of the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project; his wife (and co-editor of the volume) DePaul is its executive director. Comparisons to Hitler's genocide are inevitable: Here, too, a government systematically exterminated millions of innocent men, women, and children through a program of relocation, starvation, forced labor, and outright massacres. The narrators, who were only children when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, cannot, of course, explain why the regime ruthlessly murdered nearly two million of their compatriots, but perhaps criminal chaos is much of the point here. Uneducated (thus "untainted'') village children were less likely to be worked, starved, or walked to death, and were indoctrinated to disavow family ties and show loyalty to all-powerful Angka (the Khmer Rouge regime). Many children were forced to watch executions of their relatives without flinching. A few became monsters, like the six-year-old recollected by one witness here, who attacked a pregnant woman with an ax. With too little room to present a picture of the narrators' lives before and after the hellish years of 1975-79, the recorded memories are saved from a tedious repetitiveness by a few remarkable descriptions, such as that of an emaciated malaria victim with a swollen belly looking "like a frog,'' and a scavenging child finding duck eggs in a human skull.
This compelling material might be even more powerfully disturbing had it been accompanied by additional explanatory and background material.Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06839-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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