The memoir of a young Jewish resistance fighter, written in a Polish prison during WW II shortly before the author's escape—and death. All Holocaust narratives are sad, but some are more profoundly moving than others—for example, the story of Draenger. Justyna (her resistance alias) was 25 years old when she penned this narrative in 1943, after turning herself in to the Polish police to be with her husband, who had been captured. She was repeatedly tortured by the Gestapo, but despite her suffering, and with the help of her fellow women inmates, she managed to write her story on scraps of toilet paper sewed together with threads ripped from the prisoners' clothing. In it she tells of her activities in the Jewish youth resistance: how young men and women in their teens and twenties fought valiantly with few weapons and little hope of victory against the most terrible killing machine in humanity's history; of their dreams and ponderings, their suffering and joy. Draenger's story is tragic, first, because she and the people she wrote about were young and courageous, and most of them died horribly at the hands of the Nazis. But the narrative is also sad because it does not always do justice to the remarkable effort devoted to creating it, nor to the amazing woman who wrote it. Draenger wanted the memoir to be literary, but with no chance to edit what she wrote under such horrible circumstances, the result is often disjointed. And because she was writing a ``heroic narrative,'' she turned all of her characters into stock figures instead of the true-to-life heroes they were. She and her husband rejoined the underground after escaping from prison and died while fighting the Nazis. Reading her final words, one is most affected by the thought of what this exceptional woman might have done had she lived in a different time and a better place. (10 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55849-037-X
Page Count: 168
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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