Living history, written with enormous affection and passion. (1 map, 51 b&w photos)
The compelling story of a young Jewish woman who hid in Germany under the noses of the Nazis from 1943 to 1945.
Roseman (History/Univ. of Southhampton) has unearthed the remarkable life of Marianne Ellenbogen, née Strauss, who grew up in Essen. When the Nazis came to power, the Strausses suffered along with the other Jews of Germany as Hitler instituted the policies that led to Auschwitz. But Marianne, a self-reliant young woman, actually went to Berlin to train as a teacher in Jewish kindergartens. There, she fell in love with a young man named Ernst Krombach. Her family had money (from their grain business) and was initially spared, but the Krombachs were picked up and sent to the camp at Izbica. Incredibly, a young Wehrmacht officer risked his life to serve as a courier between the Krombachs and their friends, carrying letters and supplies into the camp and returning with news from the prisoners. When the Gestapo finally came for the Strausses in August 1943, Marianne managed to slip away in the confusion and spent the next two years hiding, more or less in the open, passing as an Aryan and sheltered by a small leftist group known as the Bund. All her immediate family died in the camps. In 1984 she published her memoirs in a small German periodical, attracting the attention of Roseman, who then interviewed her extensively and chased the elusive threads of her story all across Europe. When she died in 1996, Roseman and Marianne’s son Vivian found a treasure-trove of documents—diaries, letters, photographs, government forms—in her house, thereby permitting Roseman to reconstruct her story in astonishing detail. “I felt like an archaeologist,” the author admits, “stumbling on ancient gold, untarnished and unaltered.”
Living history, written with enormous affection and passion. (1 map, 51 b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6326-9
Page Count: 475
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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