A taut and gripping memoir of a boy fleeing from persecution.
A Holocaust survivor recounts his experiences as a child during the Second World War in this memoir.
In these pages, Sladek writes about his childhood in Czechoslovakia and his family’s determination to escape persecution by fleeing into the Tatra Mountains region of the Carpathians. He begins his story in the picturesque town of Prešov, where he lived with his parents as antisemitic restrictions grew tighter and tighter—Jews were forbidden to enter professions, had their bank accounts seized, and were told to vacate houses and apartments located on main streets (the author’s parents clandestinely moved into the housekeeper quarters of his grandparents’ house). As the persecution and round-ups increased, the author and his parents fled from their home and took to the mountains with many other refugees. They moved from town to village, enduring biting cold and the near-constant terror of discovery and capture. The author’s father was sometimes lucky enough to find work, and occasionally, when Allied bombers flew over wherever they were living, Sladek would put on his best clothes and go outside to wave at the passing planes. When they were finally able to return to Prešov after the war and the liberation of the camps, it was a bittersweet homecoming, since many of the residents had turned blind eye to their removal. Throughout the book, the author very effectively combines the wisdom of adult recollection with the spontaneous emotionality of his boyhood self. There are occasional malapropisms (“We must be getting close to Poprad, I deducted”), but there are also genuinely thrilling passages, as when the refugees escape into mountain passes and Sladek goes last in line so he can drag a pine branch behind him to obscure their footprints. The author’s recollections of his boyish feelings are memorable and touching, making this work a compelling contribution to Holocaust literature.
A taut and gripping memoir of a boy fleeing from persecution.Pub Date: July 29, 2022
ISBN: 9780578389769
Page Count: 312
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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