Still, it’s worth sticking with. A fragment, yes, but one that glimmers—and enough fragments make a monument.
“The story I am about to tell is only a fragment”: A Holocaust survivor remembers the small choices—some fraught with guilt—that allowed her to live as others died.
When the Nazis came to the Polish town of Mielec, writes Eber, a scholar of Chinese history and retired professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, they contented themselves with rounding up Jewish men for work details, forcing them to shave their beards, beating them. Everyone knew that worse was to come, and Eber describes “a particular tension, a disquiet, fueled by rumors of what the Germans planned to do next.” Eventually, in 1942, they made their move, rounding up the people of Mielec and herding them to a nearby town, then deporting them to urban ghettos. Throughout, Eber recalls, as she “came to resemble the half-starved ghetto children one sees nowadays in photographic exhibits” and withdrew into a fearful selfishness, her father remained optimistic, sure that they would survive if only they stayed together. But then the long trains bound for Auschwitz began to arrive, and Eber slipped away from her family. On the run, trying to remain calm lest the Germans spot her by the fear in her eyes, she returned to Mielec, only to be driven off by her erstwhile non-Jewish neighbors. In the next few years, sheltered by a Polish family that refused to join in the hatred, she became certain that she was the only one of her family left alive—and, moreover, she writes, “I eventually was convinced that I was the only Jew left alive.” Eber’s memoir is always affecting, her writing always elegant; some readers, however, may have trouble following events in sequence, for the narrative jumps about in time and place and the point of view frequently shifts from that of knowing adult to innocent child and back again.
Still, it’s worth sticking with. A fragment, yes, but one that glimmers—and enough fragments make a monument.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8052-4197-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
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