A poignantly illuminating Holocaust memoir.
A Holocaust survivor’s daughter chronicles how her mother used her influence as a prisoner functionary to save lives at Auschwitz.
In 2003, Lee’s mother, Hellinger, printed and sold copies of a memoir that detailed her experiences as a concentration camp survivor. But it was only after she died that Lee fully appreciated the “complexity of my mother’s story,” which Lee amplified through academic research and by drawing on the extensive recorded testimonies that Hellinger—and those who knew her—left behind. Retaining her mother’s first-person perspective throughout, Lee traces Hellinger’s life from her childhood in eastern Czechoslovakia and reveals that her mother showed an early gift for organizing Jewish community projects. She studied to become a teacher and then opened a kindergarten that Nazis allowed her to continue operating after Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In 1942, she was deported to Auschwitz with other Jewish women from her town. Using her organizational skills, Hellinger helped keep order among her fellow inmates and quickly earned the respect of female Nazi guards. Her German captors began to give her small but important prison jobs and then promoted her to prison leadership roles, which put her in direct contact with high-ranking Nazi officials. Lee shows how her mother deftly negotiated her difficult position to keep both herself and many of her fellow inmates alive. When Nazi officials chose sick prisoners to die, she used her influence to spare lives. When new prisoners arrived, she helped them learn “the ways of the camp so they would have the best chance of survival.” Written in part to clarify Hellinger’s true relationship to her captors, this book offers a much-needed perspective on the roles many so-called collaborators played in helping fellow concentration camp inmates survive the Holocaust. “Magda has been misrepresented and judged unfairly by some survivors simply because of the positions she was forced to hold,” writes Lee, who provides a solid corrective.
A poignantly illuminating Holocaust memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982181-22-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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