An inspiring story of courage rendered through impressive personal and historical detail.
A deeply sympathetic account of a group of concentration-camp dorm mates who stayed in touch years after their release.
Of the 50 or so girls who met in Room 28, only 15 survived, and ten tell their affecting stories here. Located just north of Prague, Theresienstadt (Terezin) was used by the invading Nazi forces primarily as a transit station for prisoners headed for extermination farther east, as well as a so-called model camp with a self-governing Council of Elders that the Nazis could show the outside world as evidence of their fair treatment of the Jews. In fact, the SS ran it, easily duping the outsiders. The Jewish girls, ages 11 to 14, were wrenched from their family from various parts of what the Wehrmacht had set up as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Often sickly and traumatized, they were grouped in Room 28, and soon began a difficult work routine and endured an unappetizing diet, bedbugs and epidemics such as typhoid and encephalitis. However, the youthful spirit of hope could not be extinguished even in the cruelest conditions. Through the diaries and notebooks the girls kept, as well as later personal accounts, Berlin-based journalist Brenner reveals the extraordinary means the girls and their caretakers took to share food and comfort and help each other. The author also chronicles the remarkable artistic experiments undertaken by the girls, especially their enthusiastic production of the children’s opera Brundibár.
An inspiring story of courage rendered through impressive personal and historical detail.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4244-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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