A handful of classmates relegated to Amsterdam’s Jewish Lyceum during World War II offer poignant, haunting memories of “Annelies.”
During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, all Jewish children were forced to attend special schools—in the case of the author and Anne Frank, their families chose the Jewish Lyceum. Of the nearly 500 boys and girls at the school, only half survived the war; while in the Netherlands overall, the author cites 80 percent of the Jewish population were killed, twice the percentage of Jews in Belgium and France, thus undermining the myth about Dutch benevolence toward the Jews. The author, then 13, was known as Maurice and was cited by Frank in her diary as “one of [her] many admirers, but he’s a rather annoying kid.” He remembers how his schoolmates began to stop showing up for class—for example, by the spring of 1942, labor roundups for children as young as 16 were instituted and many families had gone into hiding, such as the Franks and the author’s own dispersed family. However, many others operated under a "ghastly delusion" that in Nazi labor camps they would at least avoid hunger and illness. (Coster was taken to a farm in Vaassen and passed off as a visiting nephew.) In a joint book and film project, Coster managed to track down several surviving classmates for reminiscing, revealing stories as freshly searing as when they first occurred. Several of the survivors who had also ended up in Bergen-Belsen, like Anne, actually spoke to her there, and were impressed by her conviction to survive the war. All speak of Anne’s vivacity and spirit, although they reveal some resentment of her singular fame. Details reveal the enormous pressure on the children in hiding to be quiet and not make trouble, and the absolute lack of professional help after the war in easing the emotional trauma. The moving lore around the life of Anne Frank remains inexhaustible and eternal.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-11444-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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