A group memoir by younger Holocaust survivors, as assembled by one of the period's premier historians. At first it seems unsettling to flit from the recollections of one young Polish or Hungarian Holocaust survivor to another. But because Gilbert (The Holocaust, 1986; The Day the War Ended, 1995; etc.) has done such a superb job of weaving together the memories of some 730 children (predominantly boys) who survived the war and were rehabilitated in Britain, we get an effective overview of the experience of the Holocaust. Some of the stark details of the memories speak volumes: A mother, selected for death by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, turns to her panicked offspring with the austere words, ``Let us say goodbye, my children.'' These recollections of events and people are also historically significant and fresh. The diversity of the many voices offers a considerable range of experience. For example, did ``the boys'' (as they called themselves) turn to vengeance when the eleventh-hour death marches, the beatings, the executions, the starvation, finally ended in liberation by American troops? Yes and no. Michael Etkind pointed out escaping SS men to American troops and pleaded, ``Boom, boom.'' In contrast, when Jack Rubinfeld was confronted with a German woman with children who hadn't eaten in a day, he shared his stash of bread with them. Descriptions of the slow rehabilitation of the children in British facilities takes up the final third of the book, and this material is unique and particularly powerful: It took a while for some of the boys to learn how to wait for their food and not vault over the table to seize it. It took even longer to rekindle self-confidence. Dr. Fridolin Moritz Max Friedmann, himself an ÇmigrÇ and a skilled educator who headed a British residence devoted to easing the boys back into the world, noted that ``the habit of hope is still so new to them.'' A uniquely effective addition to Holocaust literature. (40 b&w photos, 8 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4402-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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