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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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