by Hermann Langbein ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1994
The first significant study of concentration camp resistance to focus on the political dynamics of inmates of varying nationalities and classifications. Langbein, a former prisoner who led an international resistance movement at Auschwitz, has interviewed scores of survivors to analyze the resistance movements of the major concentration camps (not those of the ghettos or transit camps). Translated from German, this study has a long-overdue emphasis on non-Jewish inmates. These prisoners, while a minority, were more active in resistance because they were less starved, more nationalistic, and, being largely single men, less encumbered by the threat of reprisals. The major inmate divisions are referred to by the colored triangle on their camp garb. Reds were political prisoners (from Spain to Czechoslovakia); Greens, the mostly German and Austrian criminals; Violets, Jehovah's Witnesses; Yellows, the predominant Jews (whose two triangles were sewn into stars); and Blacks were Gypsies, prostitutes, and other ``antisocials.'' The Reds were the best organized and motivated rebels, most able to sustain an underground movement despite betrayals and the savage reprisals that followed escapes and uprisings. Despite infighting between Reds (later dominated by Russians) and Greens, German inmates are seen as especially crucial in the Buchenwald resistance movement. The unpopular German inmates often had to deal with ``enormous spiritual conflicts,'' which resonate in their recorded testimony. Only at Mauthausen, the last camp to be liberated, were prisoners able to obtain weapons from the retreating Germans. The Spanish contingent, which led the resistance along with some Czech, German, and Russian cells, was so organized that American soldiers arrived to see their large banner draped over the camp gates: ``The Spanish anti-Fascists greet the armies of the liberators.'' Inspiring and informative, this book fills large gaps in what we know about resistance in the concentration camps.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55778-363-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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