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 taut, terse Holocaust narrative that is all the more powerful for its ironic reserve. Adelsberger (18951971), a noted German-Jewish immunologist, spent her internment in Auschwitz as a physician in the Gypsy camp (until its liquidation in July 1944) and later in the women's camp. In efficiently yet movingly rendered episodes, she conveys all the horrors of concentration camp life, and in particular the squalor of the so-called infirmary where she worked, where typhus victims lay in feces-covered blankets and kindness was all the medical aid Adelsberger could offer. She gives visceral descriptions of terror (``Fear clings to the walls in your bedroom, crawls along the floor, and drips down from the ceiling'') and physical suffering; and paints vivid portraits of moral degradation and of defiance on the part of those who have nothing left to lose (a young woman about to be executed slashes her wrists and smears her blood on the face of the camp commandant). Adelsberger's rage smolders under the cool, hard surface of her irony. How else to describe the camp dentist, ``a good-natured man'' who ``saved some from starvation, including a whole group of beautiful Gypsy women, one after the other of whom found their way into his chamber''? Adelsberger refuses even to name Josef Mengele, referring to him only as ``the camp physician,'' as though to depersonalize him the way internees were depersonalized when they were given numbers in place of their names. How else can one deal with a doctor who sends hundreds to their deaths every day, then visits the infirmary and hands out candies to the sick, starved children? Adelsberger was liberated after being evacuated to RavensbrÅck, and her memoir was published in German in 1956. It is a notable addition to the list of testimonies available in English about that darkest period of human history. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1995
ISBN: 1-55553-233-0
Page Count: 163
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
Another entry in Northwestern's ``Jewish Lives'' series (for another, see Ruth Liepman, Maybe Luck Isn't Just Chance, p. 1690), this volume recounts the experiences of a young Polish-Jewish girl between 1939 and 1945. Fishman (nÇe Clara Weintraub) was the daughter of secular, comfortable, if not prosperous, Russian Jews. Her father was a successful jazz musician in Lvov and, for a time, head of the musicians' union in that city; her mother's family had enjoyed some success in business. The Weintraubs' world was shattered repeatedly, first by pogroms, then by the Russian Revolution, and finally, and most appallingly, by the Holocaust. At first, fate was kind to them, with Lvov falling under the jurisdiction of the Red Army, but when Hitler invaded Russia and the Russians were driven out of Poland by the Wehrmacht, the round-ups and mass murders began. Lala avoided the fate that befell most of her family because she was resourceful, spunky, and a blue-eyed blonde. She managed to successfully pass for a Polish Catholic under the fictional name Urszula Krzyzanowska, narrowly avoiding arrest and certain death on numerous occasions. Like so many other recent Holocaust memoirs, this volume serves as an important reminder of the cataclysm's terrible cost, of the sheer viciousness with which the Nazis attacked not only the Jews but also the civilian population of Poland. Indeed, the most riveting section of the book is a lengthy recounting of the first day of the war, the chaos, noise, dirt, smoke, blood, and wreckage, as experienced by a teenage girl. At its best, Lala's Story reads like a good thriller. At its worst it is perfunctory but never dull. Among the better recent Holocaust memoirs, with a firm grounding in Polish-Jewish history and an admirable frankness that makes no effort to disguise its heroine's human foibles.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-8101-1499-2
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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