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 thorough comparative study of the conditions of medieval Jewish life in Christian and Muslim lands. Cohen (Near Eastern Studies/Princeton) explores and explodes the recently resurrected myth of Arabs and Jews living in an ``interfaith utopia,'' especially during the centuries of Islam's ascendancy. This fantasy of a tolerant Golden Age in Spain before 1492 (when Jews were expelled) is (European) Jewish in origin, but it gets a lot of spin from propagandists trying to show that Muslims can be anti-Zionists but have never been anti-Jewish. Among the scores of primary sources quoted here is a letter from Jewish philosopher-physician Maimonides (d. 1204), who writes that ``none has matched [Islam] in debasing and humiliating us.'' Cohen modifies such statements and battles the ``countermyth'' of Arab savagery held by contemporary Sephardic Jews, who he views as competing with their Holocaust-surviving Ashkenazic counterparts. Before the 17th century, the frequency and harshness of both Christian and Muslim persecution is about equal, but Cohen deftly differentiates between the behavior of these two hosts by studying the particular economic and social conditions of various Jewish communities under different caliphs and kings. He analyzes all the decrees (Jews had to rise in the presence of Muslims) and restrictions (Jews could not own Christian land) with condiderable historical and theological insight. Early Christians, facing life- and-death competition with Jews in the Roman empire, developed an adversarial faith that ``fulfilled'' Judaism and ``demonized'' Jews. Consequently, treatment of Jews in Christendom ranged from serfdom to expulsion. Mohammed's minions had no ongoing struggle with Arabia's quickly subjugated Jews, hence Christian and Jewish ``people of the book'' were ``second-class subjects'' but allowed some occupational diversity. For an academic study of the Middle Ages, remarkably accessible and timely.
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-691-03378-1
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
An all-too-brief but informative introduction to German Jewry since 1945, consisting of two essays by Brenner and 15 short autobiographical statements by Jewish communal, religious, and cultural leaders. Brenner (Jewish History and Culture/Univ. of Munich), himself a child of Holocaust survivors, notes that the Jewish community in Germany, which today numbers close to 50,000, has consisted of three streams: Holocaust survivors, overwhelmingly from Eastern Europe, who decided to settle in Germany for a wide variety of personal reasons; German Jews who had fled Nazi Germany and returned following the liberation; and immigrants from Israel and, starting in the mid-1980s, from the USSR. In the immediate post- Holocaust period, the community was so traumatized that a US chaplain described the survivors as ``demoralized beyond the hope of rehabilitation.'' The community also suffered both external neglect—help from American Jewish and other Diaspora organizations was late in coming—and internal divisions. While the returnees tended to be less religiously observant and more assimilated, the Eastern European survivors were largely Orthodox Jews and Yiddish speakers. In time, the two communities learned to work together and reconstituted old or established new Jewish structures in Germany. Brenner's thematic approach to this reconstruction leaves some important areas undercovered, but he does deal succinctly with a great deal of interesting material, including the recurrence of German anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, the tensions between Yekkes (German Jews) and Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews), and two major intracommunal financial scandals. Brenner reveals a community that demographically has grown surprisingly strong and durable, but that religiously and culturally remains weak, with communal leaders who have only a ``cursory awareness'' of their heritage. A very readable and useful study, written with the engaged sympathy of an insider and the balanced judgments of a fine historian. (For a profile of a postwar German-Jewish community in New York City, see Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer and Michael Kirchheimer, We Were So Beloved, p. 1438.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-691-02665-3
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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