A taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve. Adelsberger (18951971), a noted German-Jewish immunologist, spent her internment in Auschwitz as a physician in the Gypsy camp (until its liquidation in July 1944) and later in the women's camp. In efficiently yet movingly rendered episodes, she conveys all the horrors of concentration camp life, and in particular the squalor of the so-called infirmary where she worked, where typhus victims lay in feces-covered blankets and kindness was all the medical aid Adelsberger could offer. She gives visceral descriptions of terror (``Fear clings to the walls in your bedroom, crawls along the floor, and drips down from the ceiling'') and physical suffering; and paints vivid portraits of moral degradation and of defiance on the part of those who have nothing left to lose (a young woman about to be executed slashes her wrists and smears her blood on the face of the camp commandant). Adelsberger's rage smolders under the cool, hard surface of her irony. How else to describe the camp dentist, ``a good-natured man'' who ``saved some from starvation, including a whole group of beautiful Gypsy women, one after the other of whom found their way into his chamber''? Adelsberger refuses even to name Josef Mengele, referring to him only as ``the camp physician,'' as though to depersonalize him the way internees were depersonalized when they were given numbers in place of their names. How else can one deal with a doctor who sends hundreds to their deaths every day, then visits the infirmary and hands out candies to the sick, starved children? Adelsberger was liberated after being evacuated to RavensbrÅck, and her memoir was published in German in 1956. It is a notable addition to the list of testimonies available in English about that darkest period of human history. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-55553-233-0
Page Count: 163
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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