Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.
A Holocaust survivor who has dedicated her life to sharing the lessons from that horrific time presents the questions most often asked her and the responses she gives.
Swedish psychologist and author Fried (Fragments of a Life: The Road to Auschwitz, 1990, etc.) has spent much of her career and most of her retirement keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, talking with students about her experiences in the hope that no such atrocity occurs again. “I have lectured about my time in the different camps almost daily since the 1980s, and each time I talk about it, it feels like reliving it,” she writes. “Despite being very difficult, it has led to something good—it became a way for me to process my trauma.” Her approach in this concise book seems similarly cathartic, with her matter-of-fact tone conveying the everyday horror of something that had once seemed unspeakable until it was inevitable. She attributes her survival to luck and chance and to the sister with whom she remained connected after both had been separated from the rest of their family. The author writes of her impressions as a teenage girl sent to the camps, and the effect is something like what Anne Frank might have written had she survived, the writing aimed at readers who are now the same age as she was then. The questions she finds herself asked at these school lectures are the most basic and most difficult: “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”; “Why did you not fight back?”; “Do you hate the Germans?” Regarding the last question, she admits that she did but ultimately realized that “hatred does not affect the hated, but the one who hates feels terrible. It arouses vengeful feelings, and if these are acted upon the hated will soon become the one who hates. It leads to a never-ending spiral of hatred.” Fried identifies with subsequent generations of refugees and recognizes just how ugly persecution can turn if good people do nothing.
Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-59-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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