A haunting work about human depravity during World War II and the triumph over it.
A daughter relates her mother’s story of survival in Nazi concentration camps in this debut book.
Ruth Goldschmiedova, born in Czechoslovakia in 1928, enjoyed a happy childhood. But she started to notice a change in her environs around the age of 10—her non-Jewish friends would no longer play with her. In 1939, family members heard a radio announcement that Czechoslovakia was soon to be invaded by the Nazis, and ran to the factory where Ruth’s father, Oskar, worked. But the director, donning a swastika on his coat, turned them away. They were allowed to stay in their home, but compelled to wear stars that identified them as Jews, living in constant danger under a hostile occupation. In 1941, they were told to pack small suitcases and were transported to a train that took them to Theresienstadt. The conditions were inhumanly squalid, and they all but starved. Ruth remained with her mother, but her father was shipped to Auschwitz. Later, after being sent to Auschwitz, Ruth was examined on six occasions by the notoriously brutal Dr. Josef Mengele and then transferred to Oederan, where she made bullets in a factory. Ruth and her mother eventually landed in Terezin, marching for two weeks on foot to get there, a withering ordeal. Oskar managed to escape from a Nazi work camp, and they were all finally reunited in 1945. Scheller, Ruth’s daughter, movingly tells her mother’s story of survival, often describing their conversations in affectionate detail. The eclectically structured volume includes brief homages to Ruth’s father and paternal grandmother, an explanation of how her father was once helped by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, and an account of her family’s new life in America. The author’s prose is simple and direct, and she wisely allows the enormity of the events to speak for themselves without literary embellishment. But she does provide a seething account of a former boss that seems incongruent with the rest of the book, detailed in hyperbolic language: “I faced one of these situations with my former boss who, I believe, was Adolf Hitler in a past life.” This narrative anomaly aside, Scheller is an effective medium for her mother’s extraordinary life.
A haunting work about human depravity during World War II and the triumph over it.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0029-4
Page Count: 150
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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