A timely reminder of another not-so-distant ethnic cleansing, one that devastated the life of Efronia Katchadourian, subject of this affectionate memoir by her daughter-in-law. A Christian Armenian living in the dying days of Ottoman Turkey, Efronia survived the persecution and genocide brought on by the Turks, then married, and moved to Beirut only to flee that city in the 1970's and join her son and his family in California. There, she began her memoirs, which the author—a journalist and translator—has freely drawn upon. Efronia's entire growing-up was shadowed by the persecution of the Turks, who—unable to govern their decaying empire—turned on the Armenians, with whom they'd previously coexisted peacefully. Efronia's father was killed by a Turkish Moslem when she was a baby; and Efronia herself narrowly escaped the WW I deportation into the Syrian desert, during which thousands perished. The end of the war meant further dangers as the defeated Turks massacred the remaining Armenians in Smyrna and in the interior. But it's Efronia's star-crossed love affair with Ramzi, a young man of great promise, that adds an extra twist of pathos to her story. Because Ramzi was a Persian and a Moslem, Efronia's family forbade her to marry him, even though his family warmly endorsed the match. Efronia later married a fellow Armenian, but, even in her 90s, she'd not forgotten her first and only love. A bittersweet story of a woman and her enormously gifted people, whose tragic history continues today. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1993
ISBN: 1-55553-172-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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