greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)
The Holocaust account of Gustav Mahler's niece, who went from being the musical heiress of Europe to conducting a
women's orchestra at Auschwitz. There was a fictional treatment of Alma Ros‚'s story in the1980 film Playing for Time, but Canadian journalist Newman and Oregon book publisher Kirtley build this impressive book with much documentation. We are shown Ros‚’s SS order of transport and the passenger list, as well as excerpts from correspondence and interviews with relatives, friends, and the camp performers she rescued from the death chambers. The grand opera of Ros‚'s life follows two acts—before and after Austria's Anschluss (union) with Nazi Germany. Ros‚ (n‚e Rosenberg) was born in Vienna to a distinguished musical family honored by Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Her relatives and friends formed a veritable Who's Who of Viennese musical society, a Jewish elite that was much resented by the larger Austrian culture as a foreign clan. Writing letters to try to get Ros‚'s father out of the country were such luminaries as Toscanini, Thomas Mann, and Einstein. Her father's legal and medical condition kept Ros‚ close enough to be arrested by the Nazis. The authors vividly portray every step in her riches-to-rags horrors: Ros‚'s group of inmates were at first chosen to become guinea pigs for experiments in mass sterilization by X-ray. “Faced with the unimaginable circumstances of the Experimental Block at Auschwitz, Alma resorted to the two tools at her disposal: her personality and her music.” These powerful tools ordered a piano, organized many performers into a troupe, and saved many lives. When Ros‚ herself sickened and died before liberation, Dr. Mengele actually tried to save her. Valuable materials include chapter notes, interviews, sources, a bibliography, the Mahler-Ros‚ family tree, a detailed list of the women's orchestra of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a glossary of camp terms. This well-researched and highly readable biography provides a moving account of one woman’s confrontation with the
greatest horrors of the war. (60 photos)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57467-051-4
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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