A patiently recounted narrative, especially informative about Nazi atrocities in Ukraine.
The inspiring story of a Ukrainian Jewish girl trained as a pianist who performed for the Nazis to avoid capture.
The author’s mother, Zhanna Arshanskaya, did not discuss her plight with her son when he was a child living in “blissful ignorance” with his musician-teacher parents in Bloomington, Ind. Seasoned journalist Dawson, now a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, re-creates the terrifying war era by furnishing brief first-person memories in the voice of his mother that alternate with the main historical narrative, which begins with Zhanna and her younger sister, Frina, learning to play the piano at the behest of their father, Dmitri, a candy maker and violinist. As the sisters’ progressed in their musical studies, the family moved to Kharkov so that the girls could attend the city’s prestigious conservatory. But in 1941, when Zhanna was 14, “the German army moved inexorably, and murderously, across the Ukraine.” As Zhanna’s family was marching toward the killing ravines, Dmitri urged his daughter to flee: “I don’t care what you do, just live. Go!” After escaping into the countryside, Zhanna was eventually reunited with her sister. The young girls relied on strangers’ kindness and were coached to reinvent identities for themselves until their piano-playing in an orphanage caught the attention of the music school. They played for the German soldiers and then were sent as a troupe of performers to Berlin and—in a sick twist—on tour to slave-labor camps. Eventually the sisters’ musical gifts earned them passage to America and enormous later achievement, as Dawson gracefully sums up.
A patiently recounted narrative, especially informative about Nazi atrocities in Ukraine.Pub Date: July 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-045-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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