A compelling, profoundly emotional Nazi-era story that also serves as a reminder of the power of letter writing.
The son and grandchildren of Helmuth and Freya von Moltke, anti-Nazi leaders, present the last letters their parents exchanged as he was awaiting trial in Berlin in 1944.
Their letters and the explanatory footnotes reveal a deep love bolstered by a building religious devotion. “These are love letters in extremis,” write the editors. “They testify to the profound openness with which Helmuth and Freya confront their fears, declare their love, articulate their hopes, and find faith.” Helmuth consistently demonstrated unwavering trust in Freya’s abilities, and their mental, physical, and spiritual devotion only increased as the letters continued. Both were attorneys, and Helmuth was conscripted as an attorney for the Wehrmacht in 1940. Both opposed Hitler from the very beginning, and their active resistance became known as the Kreisau Circle, a dedicated faction of Germans working to break with top-heavy authoritarian political tradition. They devised detailed political and economic plans for a postwar democratic Germany. In early 1944, Helmuth was unexpectedly arrested for alerting a friend that Gestapo had infiltrated secret meetings. At first, they expected him to be released—until the failed attempt on Hitler’s life that summer. Some of Helmuth’s co-conspirators were arrested in that plot, and the Nazis worked tirelessly to find a connection to him. Helmuth’s and Freya’s letters show their remarkable optimism and unvarnished grasp on the reality of the outcome of the trial. Eventually, Helmuth was transferred from Ravensbrück to Berlin’s Tegel prison. The chaplain at the prison, Harald Poelchau, was a Kreisau member, and he smuggled the letters contained in this book. Knowing the trial would likely end in a death sentence, Helmuth and Freya exhausted every political and social connection to find help. His family, descended from one of Prussia’s greatest heroes, was their strongest weapon as they worked toward a clemency plea. On Jan. 23, 1945, Helmuth was executed.
A compelling, profoundly emotional Nazi-era story that also serves as a reminder of the power of letter writing.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-381-2
Page Count: 380
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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