Survivor’s tales come in as many shapes as mothers. This one, from the dark side, is as affecting as a kick in the stomach.
Mothers come in all shapes and persuasions: this one enthusiastically joined the Waffen SS, abandoned her children, and embraced her tasks at Auschwitz, as gloomily recounted in her daughter’s memoir.
Frau Mutti Schneider left her family in 1941, when Helga was four years old. Duty called: “Did I support the final solution? Why do you think I was there? For a holiday?” These words confront the author as she makes a last visit (only the second since 1941) to her mother, now living in a nursing home, shrunken and ancient at 90. “Senile and pathetic, cruel and romantic,” muses her daughter. “That was how Himmler’s blackshirts were, including women like herself, the SS in skirts.” Their final encounter includes moments of tenderness and pity on Schneider’s part—she is still, reluctantly, helplessly, a daughter, and that matters—but they are swamped by the utter venality of her mother’s words. “The fourth crematorium at Birkenau had no ovens . . . all it had was a big well filled with hot embers. The new commandant in Auschwitz found it terribly amusing.” Frau Schneider is touchy and arrogant, mocking in her selective recall; she drops bombshells of memory. “You were stubborn and disobedient,” she tells her daughter. “You were clever and rebellious. And you used to like hopping on one leg.” Schneider dissolves, moaning, “She can twist me around her little finger.” But not so fast. A violent sense of reality slaps the author awake, and she remembers she has made this hurtful rendezvous to discover some arc of meaning in her mother’s acts. But Mutti’s dehumanization training endures: “Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen SS, is that clear?” It’s as awful as that.
Survivor’s tales come in as many shapes as mothers. This one, from the dark side, is as affecting as a kick in the stomach.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1435-8
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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