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 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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