An incredible story of courage and compassion.
A harrowing memoir from “one of the few remaining Dutch Jewish survivors” of World War II.
With captivating and heartbreaking detail, van de Perre (b. 1922) shares her memories of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, offering “a testament to our fight against inhumanity.” Though the author enjoyed a happy childhood, in 1936, the Netherlands started taking in immigrants from Germany who “told troubling tales of National Socialism and what happened to people who renounced the Nazis.” At first, nobody paid much attention, but soon enough, German soldiers invaded and “beg[a]n to commit acts so horrific that I now struggle to believe they really happened, in spite of having experienced them myself.” As a child, being Jewish in Amsterdam never posed a problem. Her family wasn’t strictly observant, and people barely mentioned religious differences. While it may not have seemed significant at the time, “the fact that I didn’t look Jewish would later save my life.” By 1942, van de Perre was working for the resistance as a courier. For her own security, she bleached her hair and assumed a new name and identity, Margareta van der Kuit. Despite her subterfuge, however, she was arrested and put on a train to the female-only Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was greeted by SS officers with whips. She was subjected to hard labor and meals consisting of watered-down coffee for breakfast and a thin slice of bread and soup (“water with a few blades of grass or cabbage”) for supper. Throughout her time at Ravensbrück, the author remained cautious and quiet, fearing that her true identity would be revealed. Due to perseverance and some good fortune, she managed to survive her brutal circumstances, which she ably conveys in a plainspoken, touching manner, displaying a sharp memory and acute sense of the gravity of her experiences. In April 1945, she was marched to freedom. Next came the task of picking up the pieces.
An incredible story of courage and compassion.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982164-67-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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