A truly surprising denouement caps a well-told postwar account.
A daughter turns her German mother’s harrowing memories of living through the liberation of Berlin into a moving insider’s account of the time.
Lieff assumed that her mother, Margarete Dos, who was a young teenager in Berlin during World War II and who died in 2005 at age 81, knew about the gas chambers and other horrors executed by Hitler’s regime. Her mother had never wanted to talk about the war and afterward, when Dos and her mother ended up in a Russian gulag for two years. However, finally hearing her mother’s memories over the three years they spent systematically recording them at the end of her life, then finding love letters to a German soldier her daughter had never heard of, threw tantalizing ambiguities over her mother’s life and provoked new questions for Lieff. The author does an admirable job of reconstructing her mother’s extraordinary journey, allowing the frankness of detail to reflect the integrity of her mother’s voice. Indeed, the young Dos went from an Edenic childhood in Swinemünde, with doting parents and a younger brother, to Berlin after her father’s death and the remarriage of her mother. Dos claimed her family never joined the Nazi Party and were always held in some suspicion; nonetheless, she and others were swept up in the general euphoria promised by the Nazis in the wake of hyperinflation and unemployment, until it all began to “feel wrong and frightening.” Dos attempted to study medicine and work as a nurse, even as she and her mother navigated bombings, food rationing and the liberation of Berlin by the Russians. Fleeing their savagery, they tried to make it to Sweden but were imprisoned for two brutal years in the Russian gulag.
A truly surprising denouement caps a well-told postwar account.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7798-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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