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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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