The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.
After all the millions dead, after the Nazi terror, a good many Poles still found it acceptable to hate the Jews among them. Thus, this somber analytical work by Gross (History/Princeton Univ.).
Though many Poles aided and sheltered Jews during the Holocaust, many others “witnessed up close the extermination of the Jews, and they often availed themselves of the opportunities afforded by their attendant spoliation.” In the short time between the collapse of the Third Reich and Poland’s absorption into the Soviet empire, writes Gross, Jews who had survived the Holocaust began to turn up in Poland’s towns and cities and farms, some looking to reclaim their things, others merely looking for food. During this brief period of civil war, they met fierce resistance; in individual acts of terror and organized pogroms alike, as many as 1,500 Jews were killed. Seeking an answer to how this could have happened, Gross considers the history of anti-Semitism in Poland, where, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir charged, hatred of Jews is taught from birth; yet this wave of violence was so out of place even there that the Polish intelligentsia “was utterly baffled.” In one pogrom in Kielce, in 1946, Polish soldiers entered the Jewish Committee headquarters and herded its occupants outside, where a mob attacked and killed them; nurses even abused the hospitalized survivors. Sometimes, as in Kielce, the murders were marked by howling passion and bloodlust; sometimes Jews were murdered in episodes of “passionless killing,” singled out as easy victims. In most events, Gross concludes, Jews were perceived as dangerous and frightening, “not because of what they had done or could do to the Poles, but because of what Poles had done to the Jews.” The Jews were witnesses, motive enough to silence them.
The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.Pub Date: July 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50924-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
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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