A definitive history and a great read.
A magisterial doorstop of a history that is well worth the effort.
Readers whose knowledge of the resistance against Hitler comes from movies must unlearn a lot of misinformation about its contribution to victory (modest), organization (sloppy), security (inept), and level of participation (low). Impressively debunking myths and deconstructing faulty history, Kochanski adds that a resistance movement was active in every conquered nation, and heroism was widespread. However, resistance seemed futile from 1939 until Hitler’s June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Axis had conquered most of Europe. Responding to vicious Nazi treatment, Poles resisted from the beginning, but occupiers in Western Europe exerted a lighter hand, so there was a great deal of collaboration. The earliest organized opposition assisted refugees and then airmen to escape occupied Europe. This was as dangerous as sabotage, with “approximately one person being arrested for each airman who was helped.” Matters improved as Wehrmacht defeats in the Soviet Union made Allied victory a possibility, energizing resistance organizations, which learned from their mistakes, although not before a brutally efficient Gestapo devastated them with mass arrests during the summer of 1943. The resistance fighters also benefited when the Nazis vastly expanded forced labor and began their extermination programs. Various movements worked to integrate masses of young people, who suddenly had a motive to resist. Sadly, despite scattered exceptions, the resistance neglected many Jewish populations. Matters improved by 1944, with the Red Army advancing and the Allies landing in Italy and France. Legendary warfare agencies in the U.S. and Britain were dropping a steady stream of supplies and agents into occupied Europe, and most agents survived. Although sabotage dominates many popular accounts, intelligence gathering may have contributed more to victory. Kochanski continues her masterful chronicle beyond Germany’s surrender. She capably shows that while resistance organizations dissolved or entered politics in Western Europe, they continued to fight Soviet occupation or civil wars for years in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
A definitive history and a great read.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-09165-3
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | MODERN | HOLOCAUST | MILITARY | JEWISH | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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