An affecting, plainspoken memoir of a Latvian man caught in the chaos of World War II.
Bankovics’ debut memoir chronicles Latvia’s plight during World War II and his own experiences as a conscript and prisoner in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Though Poland’s history during World War II is much better documented than Latvia’s, the two countries suffered similarly because of their proximity to both Germany and the Soviet Union. The independent Republic of Latvia declared its neutrality in World War II in 1939, but Stalin ignored this and invaded in 1940. In 1941, the Nazis invaded, driving out the Soviets, occupying Latvia for the rest of the war, murdering the majority of the country’s Jews (with the help of Latvian collaborators), and forcing most of the nation’s young men into service. Bankovics, who was a teenage student in 1941, had to choose between serving in a German military “helper battalion” or joining the State Labor Service. He chose the latter, nonmilitary option. Eventually, however, he was pressed into military service with the German army, fighting on the eastern front toward the war’s conclusion. The Soviets captured him on the battlefield, confined him in a prisoner of war camp for the remainder of the war, then transferred him deeper into Russia to a gulag, where he was imprisoned for years after the war. Bankovics unflinchingly recounts these experiences. He writes with compassion of the people whose lives were destroyed by the war and of the absurdity of serving in the army of a country he was neither from nor supported. Bankovics’ account includes an introduction by the chairman of the board of the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, who provides important historical context that American readers might lack as well as 30-plus black-and-white images, including photographs, maps, and sketches. Throughout the book, Bankovics’ sense of compassion endures. “We kids saw dead soldiers for the first time in our lives,” he writes of the Russians killed during the German invasion of Latvia. “ ‘They have mothers too,’ said our own mother under her breath.”
An affecting, plainspoken memoir of a Latvian man caught in the chaos of World War II.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5144-0362-4
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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