An odd drop in the unfillable bucket of Holocaust memoirs.
The first translation of a confusing, erratic memoir of life in Auschwitz, collaboratively written by three Polish survivors.
The authors offer a rarely seen view of life in Auschwitz. As political prisoners (rather than Jews), all three were able to manipulate the deadly bureaucracy in their favor. The first third of the book depicts their rise from laborers on the cusp of extermination to well-fed service providers within the camp. We are taught the difference between good and bad work units (kommandos), we witness the horrors of disease and medical treatment in the camps, and we are given a glimpse of the starvation-crazed nihilism that governed the existence of the prisoners. Arresting stuff, narrated with neither poetry nor insight, but effective enough. The three narrators, however, become something of a triple-headed beast for the reader. Only rarely (and even then only accidentally) is it clear which of the three is narrating. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that different voices are plainly at work, and these fluctuations become more noticeable as Siedlecki et al. find themselves in the somewhat safe positions of hospital orderly, nurse in training, and "Kanada" corps member (the group that determined whether new arrivals would be sent to the gas chambers or made to work). Without starvation, regular beatings, and the proximity of death, life in Auschwitz becomes banal—which is, in many ways, the most horrifying aspect of the story. As the smoke of burnt bodies clouds the air above, the authors were having sex with gypsy women, conducting petty arguments with SS officers, and conniving to increase their take of booty from the doomed prisoners. In a letter to a loved one, the days are even described as "delightful." Perhaps originally intended to document horror, the past 54 years have rendered Siedlecki et al. strange ghosts of an uncommon Auschwitz.
An odd drop in the unfillable bucket of Holocaust memoirs.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56649-123-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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