Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.
O’Donnell, a former political correspondent at Bloomberg, debuts with a wrenching family story that spreads across much of the landscape of World War II.
The principal figure in the story is Inge, the author’s grandmother, who died in 2017; throughout the author’s youth, Inge was reticent, even secretive, about her experiences during the war. “Silence has always dominated women’s experience of war,” writes the author. Inge’s experiences, she writes, comprise “a story of love and family, of a girl from a vanished land who lived through a time when Europe, and its humanity, collapsed.” Inge and her family lived comfortably in the Prussian town of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) near the Baltic Sea. The author follows the family—and some of their acquaintances and intimates—through the war and after, chronicling the many horrors they experienced, including displacement, poverty, violence, and, finally, their eventual restoration. O’Donnell’s narrative technique is engaging. She intercuts her family’s experiences with her own as she relentlessly pursued their stories. She traveled to all the key sites, interviewed relatives and scholars, and dug through libraries and archives, including her own family’s. “There’s something about physically seeing places that drives home the reality of the past,” she writes. O’Donnell’s many discoveries included letters, photographs (many of which she includes with the text), and records of all sorts. Gradually, Inge opened up about her past, and we learn that it has some dark corners. Her youthful lover impregnated her, but his father would not permit a marriage, so he left her and went off to war. O’Donnell also discovered a number of key elements of Inge’s history after her death. The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war.
Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-8021-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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