A lamentably familiar, chilling reminder of the depths to which humans can sink.
A survivor of the Holocaust chronicles his horrific experiences in the “barbed-wire hell” of Auschwitz.
A Dutch physician, de Wind was transported to Auschwitz in 1943 and was alive when the Red Army arrived in 1945. He stayed at the camp, working as a doctor for the other survivors and writing this book. It was published in the Netherlands in 1946 but nowhere else, so this is its first appearance in English. Readers who assume that victims marched directly from the trains to the gas chambers will quickly learn that many had to endure numerous other awful crimes before they were executed. Auschwitz was not one but a series of huge camps, only one of which contained the crematoriums. An estimated 1.3 million were sent there, and about 83% died. The author begins with his train ride from a Dutch camp. Prisoners were locked in an ordinary freight car with a bucket for a toilet and no food or water for a trip that lasted three days, sometimes longer. Upon arrival, all luggage and valuables were confiscated; children, the aged, and the infirm were often immediately gassed. Jews capable of working as well as non-Jews were stripped naked, shaved, sprayed with disinfectant, ordered to choose clothes from a pile taken from dead prisoners, and packed into overcrowded barracks. Most worked in mines, quarries, heavy construction, or factories, many operated by long-established Germany companies. The conditions were barbaric: The diet, which consisted of about 1,500 calories per day, according to the author, could not sustain even a sedentary person, so most died after a few months, and their skeletal bodies were burned. Auschwitz contained a few privileged institutions such as a hospital, food preparation facilities, and warehouses; prisoners assigned in these areas had a greater chance of surviving. That included the author, who delivers a harrowing account that contains the same horrors, unspeakable behavior, suffering, and occasional humanity revealed in other concentration camp memoirs.
A lamentably familiar, chilling reminder of the depths to which humans can sink.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8575-2683-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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