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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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