A moving testimony to a lost world and a goad to keep its memory alive.
A “narrative effort to reanimate the past.”
In the years following the end of World War II, survivors of the Jewish Holocaust created “memorial books” (in Yiddish, yizker bikher) designed to record the lives of those who passed and to give hope to those who lived on. Such volumes, writes Rich—executive director of the Rowan University Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights—were “collaboratively authored, place-based memorial books that represent a confluence of Jewish liturgical, ethnographic, and historical writing.” Through richly symbolic illumination, the books told stories far more profound than words alone could. Illustrations of candles, for example, light ways through reminiscence and restoration; sometimes there are buildings, shaped almost surrealistically against a sky, like the work of an amateur Marc Chagall. And there are poems in these volumes: “If you pick up a book—my stare will be in it, / In every single line and word.” Lines of verse accompany hand-drawn maps, recalling towns that had been leveled. In a sense then, this book is itself like a paper tombstone—the yizker bihker having been “created as a sacred object, one that fulfills the obligation of remembrance and offers a connection to the people, places, and ways of life destroyed during the years of the Nazi genocide.” What the book reveals, too, is that the study of the Holocaust goes on not only in great archives or along the tracks of fields and forests but in the small, personal products of everyday people. At a time when fewer and fewer people have the lived experience of capture and exile, the book exhorts us all never to forget.
A moving testimony to a lost world and a goad to keep its memory alive.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781479841257
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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