A powerful story of a true hero who deserves more recognition.
A first-rate account of one of the few Jewish prisoners who escaped Auschwitz.
Concentration camp stories make for painful reading, but British journalist and broadcaster Freedland relates a riveting tale with a fascinating protagonist. Born in 1924 in Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Vrba was a precocious child and superachiever in school. In 1939, Slovakia became an independent, Nazi satellite state. Entirely obedient to Nazism, its government expelled Jews from schools and dismissed them from jobs. In 1942, Vrba received a summons to report for “resettlement.” Understanding the dangerous situation, he tried to escape to England. Caught in Hungary, he was sent to the first of several increasingly barbaric camps, ending in Auschwitz. Through a combination of youth, linguistic ability, and luck, Vrba attained privileges that allowed him to survive from his arrival in June 1942 to his escape in April 1944. Freedland delivers a gripping description of Vrba and a companion’s planning, breakout, and grueling walk to Slovakia, where surviving Jewish officials transcribed their story, which included, from Vrba’s memory, dates and the number of every trainload of Jews, with details of their murder and a map of the camp. By summer, articles about the horrors of the camps began to appear in Western newspapers. Readers will squirm to learn how little Vrba’s spectacular achievement accomplished. Some believed his revelations but not the people that mattered. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt consulted military leaders, and while they admitted that the Nazis were certainly mistreating Jews, they claimed that the best way to save lives was to win the war quickly. As a result, they ordered that no resources be diverted to projects such as bombing death camps. Freedland smoothly recounts Vrba’s long, often troubled postwar life, during which he persistently criticized Jewish and Israeli leaders who could have resisted the genocide more than they did.
A powerful story of a true hero who deserves more recognition.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311-2339
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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