The mystery writer tells, explicitly, honestly, the "history of a delicate time" in her East-Anglian village, from 1938-1941, which- in her personal experiences and those of her village neighbors, represent the whole of England. It has a far bigger panorama than the Kennedy book; it is less personal- more ramifying in detail and in implication. Filled with the homely — anxieties of all, problems of adaptation, local incidents, it should be humanly appealing to all types. Thirty miles from London, absorbed in things as they are, August of 1938 brings the realization of the threat of war, and the village prides itself on its emergency preparations. Then the breather after Munich, and during this period the hardening of the spiritual and mental muscles as they prepare for war. War is declared, and the perpetual surprises, good and bad excitements, the unification of the village as the unexpected numbers, and kinds, of London evacuees arrive. Then the soldiers, the bombings, the defeats that toughened them up without the "lack of an anaesthetizing panoply of battle", Churchill and the finding of a new world, and new values, a pride of race and the beneficial results of anger among a people. Much that is sombre and gay, in a book which is engrossing and moving.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1941
ISBN: 1899262032
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1941
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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