An indispensable historical document capturing the plight of “people scarred by history and then worn down by money and...
A survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre offers a searingly honest examination of the lives broken by that momentous event.
Poet Liao (For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison, 2013, etc.) presents a series of harrowing, unforgettable tales of hardship of Chinese who essentially forfeited their youth due to their revolutionary fervor during Beijing's Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989, when the authorities cleared the square with tanks, killing or injuring thousands of protesters. Unlike the more privileged Beijing students, whose parents had connections and could spirit their children out of the country, the “June Fourth thugs,” as the Chinese authorities named them, took the brunt of the violence for their zealous actions, such as throwing eggs at a Mao Zedong portrait. Most received harsh prison sentences involving appalling conditions and slave labor. For reciting a poem about the massacre, “rebel poet” Liao was sentenced to jail, torture, and slave labor. When he got out, he endured “a living hell” in terms of emotional turmoil, a broken marriage, sexual dysfunction, unemployment, and constant police surveillance. Ultimately, the only solace he found was in his mission to seek out and interview fellow “thugs,” whose stories mirrored his in many ways: idealistic youth who were swept up in general democratic spring fever, against the wishes of their wary parents incubated in the Cultural Revolution. As these powerful profiles clearly demonstrate, they paid dearly for their activism, suffering the brutality of the Chinese prison system and “education through labor” (including exhausting days making latex gloves for the American market) followed by joblessness, homelessness, and shunning from family and friends. The details about Liao’s interviewees—e.g., “the performance artist,” “the idealist,” “the arsonists,” “the street fighter”—are excruciating and intimate. Had he not fled the country in 2011, they may never have emerged; after all, three decades later, “the regime that committed the massacre is still in power.”
An indispensable historical document capturing the plight of “people scarred by history and then worn down by money and power.”Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982126-64-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Signal Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2019
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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