Bracingly intimate and heartfelt.
A moving account of educator and Holocaust survivor Laughlin's experiences living in the Warsaw Ghetto and later, two concentration camps in the north and south of Poland.
After the Germans marched into Warsaw in 1939, the author’s charmed life came to a sudden end. Soldiers immediately forced Jews "to surrender furs, paintings, jewelry and currency to pay for the war…[they] were accused of starting.” Within months, the invaders forced Warsaw citizens to move into Christian and Jewish-only sectors. The latter, known as the Warsaw Ghetto, became Laughlin's home until the uprising of 1943. Then, she, her mother and her sister were separated from her father and sent away to Skarzysko, in northern Poland, and then Czestochowa in the south, both slave labor camps that forced inmates to produce ammunition for the Nazi war machine. With heart-wrenching clarity, Laughlin recalls the "lines of giant, thundering machines with turning turbines tended by sallow, emaciated people" and the deprivation and personal degradation she, her family and other Jews endured on a daily basis. Even after they walked out of Czestochowa after liberation in early 1945, they struggled to survive. Relying on the kindness of strangers, the trio wandered from city to city, eventually reuniting with relatives and other fellow survivors and beginning to heal, a process that for Laughlin and her family would include becoming American citizens. Through her many trials, Laughlin came to understand that the pain she and her community had suffered was not one-sided. Many innocent Germans had also been condemned to concentration camps or had been expelled from territories reclaimed by Poland and Czechoslovakia. But even more profoundly, she realized that because both Germans and Jews had experienced the Holocaust together as victimizer and victim, both were bound to each other forever, "condemned to relive the shared past a thousand times; one to soothe his conscience, the other to soothe his pain.”
Bracingly intimate and heartfelt.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-89672-767-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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