by Marion Schreiber ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2004
A fine bit of historical-detective work, drawing on interviews with survivors and duly honoring those who perished.
A vivid work of history, reconstructing a little-known act of resistance in the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Youra Livchitz, a Brussels-based physician, was forced from practice in 1942 following an order that Jews be barred from medicine. He soon became acquainted with German and Austrian refugees who “refused to comply with the ‘degrading order of the Nazis’ and wear the Jewish star,” an order that preceded mass deportations of Jews to death camps in Eastern Europe by only a few months. Once the deportations were underway, Livchitz organized a daring raid on a German train that freed nearly 240 Auschwitz-bound Jews, who found shelter among mostly Catholic Belgians and, without exception, stayed out of the hands of the pursuing Nazis. German-born journalist and former Der Spiegel editor Schreiber writes that Livchitz was not so lucky. Betrayed by a White Russian double agent, he was captured and executed; a German chaplain recalled that he refused a blindfold, wanting “to be shot with his face towards the rising sun, as a symbol of life.” Schreiber’s narrative is well rendered, and full of dramatic moments. It raises an interesting larger question that is surely worth scholarly investigation: How is it that 60 percent of the Jews of Belgium survived the Holocaust, whereas only 12 percent of the Jews of neighboring Holland and similar numbers elsewhere in Europe escaped death? Notes Schreiber, “Most Belgians rejected the brutal methods that the German occupying forces used against the Jews. Especially in Brussels and Wallonia, the population proved to be largely immune to the poison of National Socialist racial hatred.” Indeed, she adds, Belgian resistance organizations urged patriots to greet Jews in passing, offer them seats on the trolley, and otherwise protest against Nazi measures—“That’ll make the ‘Boches’ furious!”
A fine bit of historical-detective work, drawing on interviews with survivors and duly honoring those who perished.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1766-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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