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 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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