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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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