Captures both tragic events and beautiful images that continue to haunt the author after more than 60 years.
Gripping memoir of a Polish family that escaped the Nazi liquidation of Jews by living in sewers for 14 months.
Assisted by veteran co-author Paisner (Last Man Down: A Firefighter’s Story of Survival and Escape from the World Trade Center, 2002, etc.), Chiger begins her story with short, colorful childhood memories of idyllic life in prewar Lvov: “Like a princess. That is how I grew up, like a character from a storybook fable.” With the Nazi invasion on September 1, 1939, however, everything in four-year-old Krystyna’s life unraveled. Under the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, at first the Soviets ruled eastern Poland, including Lvov. They nationalized her parents’ textile shop and forced the family to take additional residents into its spacious apartment, but things were “mostly okay.” But not after Hitler declared war on Russia in June 1941, and the Nazis occupied all of Poland. They used Ukrainian soldiers to terrorize and persecute Lvov’s 150,000 Jews; theft, destruction of Jewish businesses, systematic forced labor and murder became everyday experiences. Chiger’s father Ignacy had one goal: to keep his family safe. To that end he unashamedly employed guile and bribes; even his expert carpentry skills came in handy to construct secret spaces in which his daughter and son could hide during “liquidation actions.” When Nazis invaded Lvov’s Jewish ghetto for a final “action” in May 1943, the Chiger family and five other Jews descended into the city’s filthy sewers to hide. They were helped by a Catholic sewer worker who saw their salvation as a means of atoning for his early life as a criminal. Lively prose deftly describes the smell, the pitch-dark, the cold, the rats and the harrowing fear of being discovered by Nazis. Through it all, Ignacy Chiger’s ever-present sense of humor kept his family strong.
Captures both tragic events and beautiful images that continue to haunt the author after more than 60 years.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37656-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
