A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.
A man survives the Holocaust with only his art to sustain him in this biography.
Richardson tells the story of Sam Herciger, a Polish Jew born in 1917 who became an artist and gallery owner in Israel before his death in 1981, and his passage through history’s worst horrors. After an idyllic small-town boyhood and apprenticeship as a furrier, he got caught up in the antisemitism and tyranny sweeping Europe in the 1930s. A socialist at the age of 17, he crossed the border into the Soviet Union hoping to get free training in art from the workers’ state only to be arrested as a spy, beaten, and sent back to Poland. There, he was promptly arrested as a Soviet spy and tortured with electric shocks. He then traveled through Nazi Germany, dodging a German border guard’s bullets, and lived in Belgium for years, studying at an art academy, plying the furrier’s trade, and marrying. His luck ran out in 1944 during World War II when he and his wife, Hennie, were caught by the Gestapo. They were sent to Auschwitz, where Herciger was separated from Hennie and never saw her again. He plunged into a hell of backbreaking labor, starvation rations, beatings, and the threat of random killings by SS guards. He was death-marched to an Austrian slave-labor camp and got more of the same until the war’s end. Adrift—his family had been killed by the Germans—he slowly emerged from despair through painting and sculpture, which brought him growing acclaim and another chance at love. Richardson bases this searing biography on Herciger’s notes and includes informative chapters on the historical background along with reproductions of the artist’s paintings, which feature haunting, black-and-white renderings of skeletal prisoners. Her novelistic prose starkly conveys the surreal cruelty Herciger endured—“The heavy club was landing on different parts of his body, with all the force of the pig-man behind it….While he was enduring this punishment, the officer was eating chocolate”—but also finds a heartbreaking lyricism in the darkness, as at his parting with Hennie. (“Her blonde hair and pale face stood out luminously in the bleak light…as the distance between them increased.”) The result is a nightmarish yet ultimately hopeful portrait of spiritual survival in the most terrifying circumstances.
A gripping, harrowing account of suffering and hard-won humanity.Pub Date: April 28, 2022
ISBN: 9789493276123
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 intimate, stirring chronicle.
A daughter’s memories.
Booker Prize–winning Indian novelist Roy recounts a life of poverty and upheaval, defiance and triumph in an emotionally raw memoir, centered on her complicated relationship with her mother. Mary Roy, who raised her two children alone after divorcing her ne’er-do-well husband, was a volatile, willful woman, angry and abusive. In a patriarchal society that oppressed women socially, economically, and legally, she fought to make a life for herself and her family, working tirelessly to become “the owner, headmistress, and wild spirit” of an astoundingly successful school. The schoolchildren respectfully called her Mrs. Roy, and so did Arundhati and her brother. To escape her mother’s demands and tantrums, Arundhati, at age 18, decided to move permanently to Delhi, where she was studying architecture. After a brief marriage to a fellow student, she embarked on a long relationship with a filmmaker, which ignited her career as a writer: screenplays, essays, and at last the novel she titled The God of Small Things. The book became a sensation, earning her money and fame, as well as notoriety: She faced charges of “obscenity and corrupting public morality.” Arundhati sets her life in the context of India’s roiling politics, of which she became an outspoken critic. For many years, she writes, “I wandered through forests and river valleys, villages and border towns, to try to better understand my country. As I traveled, I wrote. That was the beginning of my restless, unruly life as a seditious, traitor-warrior.” Throughout, Mrs. Roy loomed large in her daughter’s life, and her death, in 2022, left the author overcome with grief. “I had grown into the peculiar shape that I am to accommodate her.” Without her, “I didn’t make sense to myself anymore.” Her candid memoir revives both an extraordinary woman and the tangled complexities of filial love.
An intimate, stirring chronicle.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781668094716
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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