An essential contribution to the modern literature of what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War.
A history of World War II closely focused on its true epicenter: the Russian front.
“Everything I undertake is directed against Russia.” So said Hitler. By German historian Hellbeck’s account, Hitler’s primary bête noire was the Soviet Union, which, in his mind, was a land fit only for enslavement; the Nazi invasion was premised on a program that would reduce the Soviet population by 20–30 million, to be replaced by German settlers. Perhaps controversially, Hellbeck holds that the Jews who would soon fall victim to the Nazi extermination regime were initially secondary: The first targets were the Communists, though Hitler immediately linked them, railing against “the Jews of the Kremlin” but drawing a distinction between “Jews as ‘racial aliens’” and “those Jews whose purported Communist ideology made them additionally a formidable threat to national security.” Hitler was correct, Hellbeck ventures, in considering Soviet Communism as “the most radical political experiment of the modern Enlightenment.” He was incorrect in believing that a Marxist “enterprise” underlay it and that it would soon crumble: Instead, Communist universalists stood in fairly united opposition to the Nazi regime and its “entrenched racism.” In 1923, Hitler proclaimed, “Either Jewish-international Marxism will survive, or Germany will.” That the Third Reich was defeated, Hellbeck asserts, was because of the Soviets, who essentially fought World War II in Europe alone until 1944, when the second Allied front opened with the Normandy landings. One highlight of Hellbeck’s narrative is his extended portrait of Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, who rightly wrote that the “Germans had incomparably more blood on their hands in the East than in the West.” Hellbeck also notes, tellingly, that in the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trials, “the Soviet Union was the only power to bring Jews to the stand.”
An essential contribution to the modern literature of what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780593657386
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
An eye-opening and thought-provoking read.
Antisemitism is alive and well and worth talking about.
Fersko, senior rabbi at the Village Temple in Manhattan and vice president of the Women’s Rabbinic Network, argues that Americans of all backgrounds must discuss antisemitism. The author notes that many people view antisemitism as a problem of the past, an issue that is rare and isolated in 21st-century America. She demonstrates convincingly that this mindset is misinformed and that antisemitism is on the rise. Early on Fersko provides a lengthy explanation of antisemitism as “the longest-held, farthest-reaching conspiracy theory in the world.” She explains that antisemitism is a belief in a variety of lies and stereotypes about Jews and Judaism, which manifests in everything from seemingly innocuous remarks to outright physical violence. Fersko points to seven points of dialogue that Jews and non-Jews need to address in order to help battle antisemitism, including race, Christianity, microaggressions, the Holocaust, and Israel. Throughout, she urges readers to educate themselves about the past and to learn to recognize the prejudices about Jews that many Americans inherit unknowingly. Though Fersko addresses such obvious sources of antisemitism as right-wing and racially based extremist groups, she makes it clear throughout the book that the American left is also a major source of antisemitism today. In some cases, this is seen in virulent anti-Israel stances, where left-wing activists portray Jews as racists and oppressors. In other cases, American liberals simply perpetrate tropes and stereotypes about their Jewish friends and neighbors, often through microaggressions, misplaced humor, miseducation about the Holocaust, etc. Though there are certainly points for debate, the text serves as a meaningful starting point for dialogue. If nothing else, she provides the important reminder that the age-old specter of antisemitism is not extinct; in many ways, it’s stronger and more dangerous than at any time since the Holocaust.
An eye-opening and thought-provoking read.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781541601949
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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