A distinguished and affecting account.
A recipient of the Marion Samuel Prize commemorates the 60th anniversary of Samuel’s death with a brief overview of her short life.
Established in 1999 by the German Remembrance Foundation to commemorate Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, this annual award for historical research deliberately took the name of a girl about whom nothing was known save the place and date of her birth and the date of her deportation to Auschwitz at age 12. Upon winning the prize in 2003, German Holocaust historian Aly (Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, 2007, etc.) decided to research Marion’s life, and this slender tome contains the results. The author turns up some interesting material on both Marion and her relatives from the archives. Photographs and birth certificates belonging to various members of the Samuel family are reprinted in the early pages of the book. As the author weaves together the various strands of their lives, the documents he unearths become more disturbing. They detail the repossession of the Samuel home, inventory the contents of their apartment and list Marion on a roster of Jews taken to Auschwitz. There is nothing remarkable about the life of this young girl and her kin. Aly relates no daring escape attempts or epic tales of bravery against all odds. Instead, he humanizes his subject by reprinting a touching letter from a former classmate. In 2003, Hilma Krüger recalled a pretty girl with “large almond eyes” and a sad moment in 1938, just before Marion was forced to leave the school, when she burst into tears and confessed her fears: “People go into a tunnel in a mountain, and along the way there is a great hole and they all fall in and disappear.”
A distinguished and affecting account.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7927-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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