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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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