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 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
