Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.
A Holocaust survivor who has dedicated her life to sharing the lessons from that horrific time presents the questions most often asked her and the responses she gives.
Swedish psychologist and author Fried (Fragments of a Life: The Road to Auschwitz, 1990, etc.) has spent much of her career and most of her retirement keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive, talking with students about her experiences in the hope that no such atrocity occurs again. “I have lectured about my time in the different camps almost daily since the 1980s, and each time I talk about it, it feels like reliving it,” she writes. “Despite being very difficult, it has led to something good—it became a way for me to process my trauma.” Her approach in this concise book seems similarly cathartic, with her matter-of-fact tone conveying the everyday horror of something that had once seemed unspeakable until it was inevitable. She attributes her survival to luck and chance and to the sister with whom she remained connected after both had been separated from the rest of their family. The author writes of her impressions as a teenage girl sent to the camps, and the effect is something like what Anne Frank might have written had she survived, the writing aimed at readers who are now the same age as she was then. The questions she finds herself asked at these school lectures are the most basic and most difficult: “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”; “Why did you not fight back?”; “Do you hate the Germans?” Regarding the last question, she admits that she did but ultimately realized that “hatred does not affect the hated, but the one who hates feels terrible. It arouses vengeful feelings, and if these are acted upon the hated will soon become the one who hates. It leads to a never-ending spiral of hatred.” Fried identifies with subsequent generations of refugees and recognizes just how ugly persecution can turn if good people do nothing.
Timeless lessons taught with simple eloquence.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-59-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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