An illuminating, welcome addition to the literature of the Holocaust and its aftermath.
A painstakingly researched account of the seaborne refugee operations to deliver Jewish survivors of the Third Reich to what would become Israel.
Whitehouse, a journalist and historical adviser at Vienna-based Centropa, “an interactive database of Jewish memory,” impressively documents a moment in history when more than 1,000 Holocaust survivors gathered on a Ligurian beach and clambered aboard a rickety ship that was stuffed far beyond its capacity, sailing to the British Mandate of Palestine on a thankfully uneventful eight-day journey across the Mediterranean. The survivors braved Italian authorities, a British naval blockade, and an oddly hostile reception by those who reflexively believed that “they must have done some wrong in order to still be alive.” In order to effectively chronicle this and other tales of rescue, Whitehouse traveled to such critical sites as Berdychiv, where the Soviet journalist Vasily Grossman “was shocked to discover the major role that his former Ukrainian neighbors had played in the murder of his mother, his relatives and the thousands who lost their lives”; tourist-packed Auschwitz, where “cars and coaches fill the carparks and locals quick to make a few zlotys try to divert day-trippers from the free parking to their private paying lots”; and Dachau, “not a place that lends much help to the road-trip historian.” During her journey interviewing survivors, relatives, archivists, and historians, Whitehouse learned about stories not often recounted elsewhere, including the work of avenging former prisoners who poisoned their interned erstwhile SS guards with arsenic-laced bread; of the Jewish Brigade of the British army, “a unit of soldiers who had effectively gone AWOL” to help Holocaust survivors escape to Palestine; and of Italian partisans and ordinary townspeople in helping overcrowded refugee ships sail, a story commemorated in Leon Uris’ novel Exodus.
An illuminating, welcome addition to the literature of the Holocaust and its aftermath.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78738-377-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
HISTORY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | MODERN | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | WORLD | ETHNICITY & RACE
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
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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