Kalib was born in 1931, the beloved youngest child of a wealthy, large, and close-knit family in Bodzentyn, a town of 4000, including 1400 Jews, near Cracow, Poland. She is neither a poet nor a theologian. The form in which her husband and a colleague have helped her recast her reminiscences is straightforward, even plodding at times. But from the accretion of details emerges a picture with fresh power to shock and disturb. No novelist could invent the German policeman who shot Jews for sport, photographed them as corpses, and then buried them in a sort of private cemetery for his trophies. Even more upsetting than the account of barbarism is the story of Jewish attempts to survive and carry on in a human way: hiding textbooks under flowerpots because by October 1939 Jewish children were forbidden to study; sneaking past Auschwitz guards in 1944 to keep in touch with family members. The youth and vitality that helped the author survive illuminate the horrors she went through with primary colors. Her father's wealth and resourcefulness protected the family for a time. In 1942, as the Germans were rounding up the Jews in nearby villages, Kalib was sent into hiding with a Polish landowner and her communist nephew. She paints a moving portrait of this woman, compassionate and courageous but, like many Poles, so anti-Semitic- -with Church encouragement—that she saw what was happening to her Jewish neighbors as punishment for their murdering Christ. Later, Kalib joined the rest of her family in a labor camp. In 1944, they were shipped to Auschwitz. In 1945, the survivors went on a death march to Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank had gone that same way. Kalib's child's-eye view of Auschwitz's maniacal orderliness and the world's-end chaos of Bergen-Belsen makes a useful complement to the famous diary. At a time when revisionists are running ads in college newspapers claiming the Holocaust is a hoax, this affecting memoir should go into every high-school and college library.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-87023-758-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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