A heartbreaking yet ultimately redemptive account from the 20th century’s darkest days.
One of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau tells her remarkable story.
When Friedman and her mother miraculously walked out of the extermination camp together in April 1945, her mother said one word: “Remember.” Now 83, Friedman has penned a memoir with the assistance of veteran war reporter Brabant, seeking to “immortalize what happened, to ensure that those who died are not forgotten. Nor the methods that were used to exterminate them.” Beginning at age 2, Friedman shares gut-wrenching memories of life in the Jewish ghetto in German-occupied central Poland known as Tomaszów Mazowiecki, where she and her family were forced to live. Eking by in overcrowded, often squalid conditions, they struggled to find food, witnessed the disappearances of family and friends, and lived in constant fear. “When I heard heavy boots,” she writes, “I knew trouble was imminent.” Throughout this time, the only certainty was her parents’ enduring love. “Beyond them…there was nothing but the abyss,” she writes. When she was 5, Friedman and her family were sent to Starachowice labor camp, and the author shares the raw details of the brutality and horrors that she and her family experienced. Then she and her mother were relocated to Auschwitz-Birkenau, while her father was sent to Dachau. Through luck and determination, they managed to cheat death multiple times; however, the psychological effects would last a lifetime. Although Friedman and her parents survived, their struggles did not end after the camps. They continued to face antisemitism and struggled to reassimilate. In one of the most haunting passages, the author describes a “recurring nightmare” of “walking among dead bodies…after which further sleep is impossible.” Despite the many horrifying ordeals she has endured, she remains courageous and faithful: “Everything I do, every decision I make today, is forged by the forces that surrounded me in my formative years.” Actor Ben Kingsley provides the foreword.
A heartbreaking yet ultimately redemptive account from the 20th century’s darkest days.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-335-44930-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A diligently gathered series of personal stories shows a world defined by difficulty and complexity.
An American Jew of Israeli parents returns to Israel to delve into the complicated makeup of that country’s society and demographics.
In his latest book, Michaeli, a Jewish author and activist who hails from Chicago, returns to the adopted land of his parents, early kibbutzim residents who survived the Holocaust. During several years of visits from 2014 to 2018, the author interviewed Israeli citizens and refugees in order to document their stories of survival and aspiration. Though the narrative initially lacks a concrete theme and meanders, Michaeli eventually hits his stride, offering useful, focused sociological portraits of his many subjects. “My goal was to document Israel at this crucial historical moment,” he writes, “and so I kept my literary lens at street level, letting conversations unspool and allowing people to speak for themselves.” On his first visit, when bombs were falling between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, he visited his brother, Gabriel, 17 years his senior, who was born on a kibbutz on the Sea of Galilee. Gabi, a lawyer, opened a whole world of contacts for his brother, and the narrative progresses through a wide-ranging variety of on-the-ground reportage, uncovering a teeming world of Israelis and Palestinians working and living in uneasy proximity. Whether visiting the Tel Aviv suburbs, fashionable cafes in Jerusalem, the West Bank, or Ponevezh Yeshiva, “one of the essential institutions of the Haredi world,” Michaeli reveals aspects of the country’s character that historians and journalists have been unable to capture. “Neither a cautionary tale nor an international role model, Israel is a microcosm, a tiny domain that contains the truth of how the world really works,” writes the author. “The state’s survival will be determined, then, by the extent to which it is able to accommodate all its tribes, creating a system that respects each tribe’s integrity, but ensures that all are able to contribute to the collective.”
A diligently gathered series of personal stories shows a world defined by difficulty and complexity.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-268885-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An invaluable report by US Army personnel assembled immediately after liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. This vast project, undertaken by German-speaking members of the Army's Psychological Warfare Division, somehow lay unpublished for 50 years. One faded carbon copy turned up, allowing Hackett (History/Univ. of Texas, El Paso) the opportunity to translate and edit the Army interview team's findings and testimonies. Part I, the main report, is a formal presentation of the camp's history, organization, operation, inmate population and treatment; some of the most incriminating data is from Buchenwald's own administrative files. The second part consists of individual reports, imprecise but impressive, written by some of the more lucid of the 21,000 survivors. Because the reportage is the work of soldiers rather than journalists, some revealing opinions slip through: The skeletal survivors, one report candidly notes, ``are brutalized, unpleasant to look on. It is easy to adopt the Nazi theory that [the victims] are subhuman, for many have in fact been deprived of their humanity.'' While much of the recorded mass murder involves Jews from a half dozen nations, there is documentation here of the mistreatment of homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Allied prisoners of war, and anti-fascists. More moving than the lists of victims are the detailed descriptions of elaborate tortures of individuals: One gypsy was placed in a tiny wooden crate with driven nails to meet his slightest movement, while Jewish laborers were forced to bury two of their colleagues alive. Significant chapters cover medical experimentation on humans, the treatment of children, the record of resistance and sabotage, and the poswar trials of key Nazis who operated in Buchenwald. This is an essential document of WW II and Holocaust history. (maps, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; History Book Club featured selection)
Pub Date: April 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-8133-1777-0
Page Count: 444
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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