Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.
This chillingly meticulous chronicle of a dozen escapees from a Nazi extermination camp underscores the mechanics of heroism and the fallibility of memory.
Journalist Heath, a National Magazine Award winner, ably narrates the disturbing story of the camp at Ponar, Lithuania (“never a work camp”), where 70,000 Jews were rounded up, shot, and dumped in pits, beginning in July 1941, only to be disinterred and burned to hide the evidence. Throughout, the author expertly highlights the grisly contradictions and trauma of the Holocaust. Although what happened at Ponar had been documented by the end of World War II, the story was relegated to a footnote for the next 30 years. The author masterfully resurrects the events, tracing accounts of the 12 men who miraculously escaped through a tunnel they dug at the killing pits on the night of April 15, 1944. As Heath recounts, they had been among 80 Jewish prisoners who were sent to the pit site to perform the grisly duties of digging up the decomposed corpses and burning them on towering pyres—so that, in the “magical thinking” of the Nazis, no trace of the crimes would be left as the Soviet troops advanced. However, not only did the 12 men escape and tell their stories—many not believed, though one testified at Nuremberg—but some of the inhabitants of the forest town also saw what was going on, including a journalist neighbor who documented the activity in a diary that was later found and published in 1999. Heath painstakingly sifts through the conflicting accounts over the decades, analyzing discrepancies, details, and contradictions. Ultimately, he learned, just like the survivors, “of how great the distance could be between speaking out and being heard.”
Utterly absorbing in its powerfully detailed horror and inspiring redemption—a must-read in Holocaust studies.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780805243710
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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