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
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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