Remarkably, a sense of adventure and joy of life are sustained in an account that moves through civilization’s worst...
A terrifying view from the epicenter of the Holocaust, preserved in the adolescent memory of a young Polish Jew with a mission.
Halter (b. 1927), the architect renowned for his design for Israel’s Holocaust memorial, tells a harrowing story, narrated in simple, straightforward prose that harkens back to his mother’s admonition to “record, don’t judge” when he began keeping a notebook. Even before the war, writes Halter, the Jews in the small Polish village of Chodecz faced school quotas, suspicion, prejudice and discrimination. But not everything was bad—since Roman Catholics don’t consider the water safe until it’s blessed by a priest, customarily in late June, they had the lake to themselves for swimming in spring. They realized, however, that when the Nazis arrived, as everyone believed they would, nobody would be able to stand between the SS troopers and their principal prey. And that’s exactly how it happened. Halter witnessed the killing, as if for sport, of several of his friends, a memory that will haunt him forever. The Halters were transported, as were all the Jews from nearby towns, to the ghetto of Lodz for forced labor. Starvation and disease killed the author’s grandfather and father, and Halter was eventually separated from his mother as other relatives were dispersed to destinations unknown. The author amazingly survived Auschwitz, Stutthof, the Allied firebombing of Dresden and an SS death march, from which he escaped with the help of a German couple later persecuted for aiding Jews.
Remarkably, a sense of adventure and joy of life are sustained in an account that moves through civilization’s worst nightmare.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-55970-854-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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