Sad, controversial and illuminating.
A mother explores, morally and emotionally, her decision to forgo medical help and allow her newborn son to die.
Within hours of giving birth to a son, Silvan, Wesolowska learned that he was not the healthy baby they had hoped for. Silvan was plagued with physical problems requiring intervention: a blood clot followed by a seizure. After falling into a coma, he was diagnosed with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, a condition in which the brain doesn't receive sufficient oxygen. Silvan was kept alive over the following weeks with a feeding tube. Though this heart-wrenching book revisits scenes from the author’s Catholic childhood, during which she was consumed with fear of losing her mother, and includes present-day musings on raising the sons she subsequently had, the majority of the narrative unfolds over the month of Silvan's life. Wesolowska describes the grave difficulty of the choice she and her husband faced and, weighing Silvan's "extremely grim" prognosis, why they decided to remove his feeding tube. They were required to meet with the hospital's ethics committee, and their choice to let their son die was met with reactions ranging from outrage to compassion. They took Silvan home, where his system gradually shut down. "Love outlasts grief," Wesolowska concludes. "Though we can't say for certain we made the right choice for Silvan, our love for him has survived." Written in the present tense, the book is an achingly beautiful and honest chronicle, sure to incite mixed reactions. This isn't a memoir aimed to comfort, but rather to reveal one family's experience, and Wesolowska presents her story with grace.
Sad, controversial and illuminating.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0986000713
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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