A riveting, intimate look deep inside the machinery of the executioner.
Harrowing personal reflections by the Cambodian French filmmaker of surviving the Khmer Rouge as a young teenager.
Rithy Panh’s film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine explored the stories of the prisoners and their torturers from the notorious Security Prison 21, in Phnom Penh, from 1975 to 1979, yet it was only recently that he was able to interview the feared commander of the prison, known as Comrade Duch. In this work, Rithy Panh uses selections from his chilling interviews with Duch as a frame for the author’s own traumatic memories of being driven from his home with his family by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, one day before his 13th birthday. Evacuated to the countryside by the Khmer Rouge, the author, his father (serving then as an undersecretary of education), mother and younger siblings were branded “new people” by the regime—i.e., “oppressors who were to be reeducated in the countryside—or exterminated.” Moving around squalid transit camps and cooperative housing, suffering increasingly from starvation and disease, the family was stricken one by one until only the author was left to fend for himself, “a starveling, an eater of scraps,” in hospitals or camps, indoctrinated into the vicious ways of the Khmer Rouge yet able to squeak by until the Vietnamese liberation in 1979. Alternating with these memories are commentaries by the mocking and philosophical Duch, an exquisite administrator who “put the language of slaughter down on paper” and ran his torture prison like a tight ship. A technician of the revolution, as Duch considered himself, he calmly informed the filmmaker that “the Khmer Rouge were all about elimination. Human rights didn’t exist.”
A riveting, intimate look deep inside the machinery of the executioner.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-558-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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