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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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