A moving story of one man’s endurance in the worst imaginable conditions.
A biography of Wilhelm Brasse (1917-2012), a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz who survived by becoming an official photographer for the Germans.
Translated from the Italian by Higgins, the book draws from a BBC interview with Brasse, interviews with his two children, and material in several Holocaust museums. Crippa and Onnis take a quasi-novelistic approach to their subject, presenting detailed descriptions and passages of dialogue evoked by Brasse’s stark photos of fellow prisoners and of the German guards and other prison staff, including the infamous camp doctor, Josef Mengele. At first, the authors suggest, Brasse was simply doing whatever it took to avoid being sent to the gas chambers. His photographic skill, honed before the war in his uncle’s studio, made him useful to the camp administration, who enlisted him to document the incoming prisoners. Brasse also ingratiated himself with the Nazis by taking or developing their personal photos and, at one point, by producing a run of cheery postcards to be sent to family members to show how pleasant camp duty was for the staff. Eventually, Brasse took the considerable risk of helping fellow prisoners carry out various forms of resistance, such as smuggling out evidence of the horrific conditions inside the camp. When news of the Russian advance through Poland arrived, he disobeyed his orders to destroy the photographic evidence, leaving it for the Russians to find when they liberated the camp. “A tide of memories broke over him in an instant,” write the authors of the moment he decided not to burn the photos. “Years of imprisonment and servitude passed before his eyes. There they all were, right in front of him. He realized he could tell the story behind every single picture, and this awareness filled him with an energy and resolve he’d never felt before.” The prose is functional yet unexceptional, but the authors provide another sharp reminder of the extent of Nazi evil, enhanced by the black-and-white photo insert.
A moving story of one man’s endurance in the worst imaginable conditions.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72824-404-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
An inspiring narrative that will be especially valuable to young people seeking to work for humanitarian causes.
A moving account of a determined young woman’s journey from poverty to humanitarian activism.
Raised by a generous, wise grandmother in Zimbabwe, Nyamayaro came of age in a time of withering heat. “There is no cool or comfortable place to hide,” she writes on the first page of her memoir. “The leaves of the tree are long gone, and with it the shade, burned away by the punishing drought that has descended on our small village.” The ensuing famine meant widespread death, but she was kept from starvation by the ministrations of U.N. aid workers. She was determined to become an aid worker herself. In 2000, at the age of 25, she moved to London, where an Irishwoman she met in a hostel dubbed her “Girl from Africa.” Nyamayaro, who returned the favor by dubbing the woman “Tiny Nose,” didn’t mind the sobriquet: “The fact that I’m African is all that matters, and that is enough. I am after all Mwana Wehvu—a child of the African soil.” Scraping to survive, finally finding work as a janitor, she talked her way into a volunteer position at a humanitarian agency and began to take on projects of increasing importance—e.g., developing responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping her native country and working to help the government of the nation of Georgia to maintain a health insurance program for impoverished communities. Leading a team to combat maternal mortality in childbirth, Nyamayaro became increasingly aware of the scarcity of resources as well as the pervasiveness of gender inequality. “Why is it that despite all the progress made by the women’s rights movement,” she asks, “no country or company or institution in the world can yet claim to have achieved gender equality?” Throughout this memorable account of her impressive life, the author recalls “the central, definitive African value and philosophy of ubuntu: that when we uplift others, we are ourselves uplifted.”
An inspiring narrative that will be especially valuable to young people seeking to work for humanitarian causes.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982113-01-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.
A meditation on Austria’s capitulation to the Nazis. The book won the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
Vuillard (Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business, 2017, etc.) is also a filmmaker, and these episodic vignettes have a cinematic quality to them. “The play is about to begin,” he writes on the first page, “but the curtain won’t rise….Even though the twentieth of February 1933 was not just any other day, most people spent the morning grinding away, immersed in the great, decent fallacy of work, with its small gestures that enfold a silent, conventional truth and reduce the entire epic of our lives to a diligent pantomime.” Having established his command of tone, the author proceeds through devastating character portraits of Hitler and Goebbels, who seduced and bullied their appeasers into believing that short-term accommodations would pay long-term dividends. The cold calculations of Austria’s captains of industries and the pathetic negotiations of leaders who knew that their protestations were mainly for show suggest the complicated complicity of a country where young women screamed for Hitler as if he were a teen idol. “The bride was willing; this was no rape, as some have claimed, but a proper wedding,” writes Vuillard. Yet the consummation was by no means as smoothly triumphant as the Nazi newsreels have depicted. The army’s entry into Austria was less a blitzkrieg than a mechanical breakdown, one that found Hitler stalled behind the tanks that refused to move as those prepared to hail his emergence wondered what had happened. “For it wasn’t only a few isolated tanks that had broken down,” writes the author, “not just the occasional armored truck—no, it was the vast majority of the great German army, and the road was now entirely blocked. It was like a slapstick comedy!” In the aftermath, some of those most responsible for Austria’s fall faced death by hanging, but at least one received an American professorship.
In this meticulously detailed and evocative book, history comes alive, and it isn’t pretty.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-969-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
GENERAL HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | MILITARY | HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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