Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.
A former inmate of the concentration camp that provided slave labor to Oskar Schindler’s factory informatively recounts the compilation of the businessman’s famous list.
Pemper, who offered key assistance to Schindler in saving the lives of several hundred Jews during the Holocaust, begins by chronicling his childhood in Kraków. It was always an anti-Semitic city, but not until the Nazi occupation of Poland did life for its Jewish residents become intolerable. Chapters on the maneuverings and deception required just to survive during those dark days are stark and dramatic, though similar to those in many other memoirs about the period. What makes the book stand out are the author’s harrowing descriptions of life at the Plaszów concentration camp and his work there. Chosen by camp commandant Amon Göth to be his typist and personal secretary, Pemper’s translation skills and administrative abilities protected him from much of the cruelty inflicted on inmates. He had extensive exposure, however, to the barbaric treatment of others and was later a key witness at Göth’s trial for war crimes. Through the commandant, Pemper came to know Schindler, who used camp personnel in his weapons business. The author lavishly praises Schindler’s humane efforts to rescue his employees and their families, but goes to great length not to deify his friend and savior. Schindler “certainly didn’t come to Kraków as a rescuer,” Pemper writes. “He came as a businessman. But when he saw what was going on in Poland, and how the occupiers were treating us, he decided to do something about it.” Though the author admires Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award–winning film version of Schindler’s List, he details instances in which the director changed facts to make the 1993 film more dramatic. Schindler did not dictate the list of people he wanted from memory as he did in the movie, for example, nor did he show up at Göth’s villa with a suitcase full of cash.
Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-286-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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