Though 70 years have passed since the systematic, inhuman events in this compelling autobiography, it remains incredibly...
Rychner-Reich’s coming-of-age memoir, set during the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust.
This gripping account, which begins in the late ’30s, depicts a bourgeois German family’s descent from financial and social success to agonizing struggle for survival in Bergen-Belsen’s camps. As the madness of Hitler’s reign progressed, Rychner-Reich and her loving, hardworking family were driven to progressively more desperate measures. The family suffered constraints on their livelihoods and their movements, eventually abandoning their possessions in the flight to Poland. The author paints a clear picture of the Nazi regime’s psychological warfare–the Jews and other targeted groups were constantly adapting their movements or dressing to conform to the latest arbitrary regulation, never knowing what to expect. However, the true horror wasn’t the random enforcement of questionable rules, but the utter brutality of what Rychner-Reich terms the “Nazibeasts” or “Nazibrutes.” The descriptions of shocking violence are painful merely to read, to say nothing of what the author witnessed firsthand. The psychological strain that survivors must withstand becomes more painfully evident as Rychner-Reich’s story continues. Aside from two older brothers who emigrated to Argentina before the war, the author lost every member of her immediate family to the Nazis. The memoir is generally chronological, but occasionally jumps back and forth in time–this doesn’t affect the story, instead serving almost to convey the confusion and miasma of the time. The only saving grace for readers is that Rychner-Reich survived to marry, have a family and join her voice with those of other survivors.
Though 70 years have passed since the systematic, inhuman events in this compelling autobiography, it remains incredibly painful to read.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1936
ISBN: 978-0-595-44553-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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