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 hodgepodge of musings about mostly run-of-the-mill childhoods. Oral historians who lack the gifts of a Studs Terkel have to make difficult choices. They can go with unusual or famous people and sacrifice the representative sampling. Or they can interview dozens of average joes and end up with a pretty dull book. Unfortunately, the Frommers (It Happened in Brooklyn, not reviewed, etc.) went with the second option. Not that there aren't a few extraordinary characters: Meyer Lesser left home at 13 and crossed the country as a hobo during the Depression. Never denying he was Jewish often got him into trouble; but it also turned out to be a boon, since he could always count on charity from Jewish communities. Al Lewis grew up on a horse farm in upstate New York—a strange business for a Jewish family, and even stranger in that the Lewises had been raising horses for five or more generations back in Germany; Al later went into vaudeville. A few minor celebrities make appearances, such as New York Times columnist Frank Rich, authors Neil Postman and Bel Kaufman. But for the most part, the people speaking in these pages scream ``ordinary,'' and nobody is given enough airtime to provide the detail and analysis that would make an examination of these lives profound. Some experienced anti-Semitism; some did not. Some felt excluded by other Jews (Sephardic rabbi Marc Angel describes his experience with the Seattle Ashkenazic community); some felt most at home when with other Jews. They describe their feelings about the Holocaust, about bar mitzvahs, about America. Some of these stories told at greater length could have formed an interesting document; but this badly organized (neither chronological, nor consistently thematic) and piecemeal conglomeration is unenlightening. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-100132-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Liepman, a prominent European literary agent, recalls her turbulent Holocaust story and her career in this entry in Northwestern's ``Jewish Lives'' series. Born Ruth Lilienstein, the author grew up in a privileged Jewish family. Her father was a physician, the son of Orthodox parents who had rejected religion while closely embracing his Jewish identity. Ruth grew up as a smart, questioning young woman with a ``naive but powerful sense of justice.'' Fueled by her experiences at the excellent but unconventional Lichtwark School, that sense of justice became an understanding of the way the world mistreats some and pampers others. Inevitably, at 19, she joined the German Communist Party and became an active cadre. She took up the study of law as a way of sidestepping her father's expectation that she would join his medical practice, and excelled in that field. But her politics and her Jewishness marked her as an obvious early target of the Nazis. As German historian Inge Marssolek notes in the book's postscript, Lilienstein was one of the first lawyers dismissed by the Nazis on ``political and racial grounds.'' She fled to Amsterdam in 1934, acquired a neutral passport by marrying a sympathetic Swiss, and went to work for the Swiss consulate after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, saving many Jews, until circumstance forced her to go underground herself. When the war ended, she returned to Germany, met and married Heinz Liepman, a writer, and eventually ended up running the literary agency that has represented such classics as The Naked and the Dead and Catcher in the Rye in their German markets. Liepman, now 87, tells this dazzling story of intrigue and danger in flat, conversational prose with the faint air of the tape recorder running through it.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-8101-1294-9
Page Count: 127
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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