A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember—and one that must always be remembered.
A deceptively slender study of history’s most notorious killing ground.
As German historian Steinbacher (Ruhr Univ., Bochum) observes, Auschwitz—known as Oswiecim in Polish—was a center of Galician Jewish life long before the rise of Nazism, with a 19th-century population that exceeded that of Polish Catholics. It was also the site of a huge WWI–era camp for Sachsengänger, seasonal workers in the Austro-Hungarian war economy; the camp comprised 90 barracks capable of housing 12,000 workers, and it was this that formed the core of the Nazi-era concentration camp. That version of Auschwitz first served as a prison for Polish political prisoners, then expanded to hold Reich German prisoners who enjoyed special privileges as compared to the Jewish population that would soon fill the camp. Steinbacher notes that Auschwitz was never escape-proof, though only Poles tended to enjoy much success in fleeing the camp, and then only a few of them. Auschwitz expanded dramatically when German industries such as IG Farben established factories behind the barbed wire; Russian prisoners of war were apparently meant to serve as the labor force, though these were killed off quickly and in any event were in shorter supply once the war began to turn against Germany. “When it became clear that Soviet prisoners of war were not going to be supplying the massive numbers of workers expected,” Steinbacher writes, “Birkenau camp was transformed, in a sequence of decisions that cannot be reconstructed, into an extermination camp.” In that guise, the now-massive Auschwitz complex saw the deaths of an unknown number of Jewish inmates; Steinbacher estimates the number to be between 1.1 million and 1.5 million, though the camp commandant boasted that 3 million had died there. Steinbacher closes with a denunciation of Holocaust deniers such as David Irving, “a falsifier of history, an anti-Semite and a racist” whose unsuccessful libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt is the subject of the latter’s History on Trial (Feb. 2005), to which this little book serves as a valuable companion.
A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember—and one that must always be remembered.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-082581-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
HISTORY | HOLOCAUST | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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