A coolly told story of a harrowing time and a young woman’s struggle to survive.
Simon’s son gave her a tape recorder, and the result is a crisp, detailed memoir of her years as a U-Boat (“those who had gone underground in the Nazi period”) in World War II–era Berlin.
A Berlin-born, comfortably raised Jew, the author at first tried to cooperate, working as forced labor at Siemens. However, she well understood that for a Jew in Germany, there was no future. Her stories of sabotage of the nuts and bolts they built for Siemens show a people strong and clever enough to fool their captors. From the beginning, Simon relied on the help of Dr. Benno Heller, a gynecologist who connected her with those who would hide her. (Heller was imprisoned in Berlin, deported to Auschwitz, and ended up in Lieberose-Jamlitz, where he was last seen in early 1945.) The author’s story of sitting quietly in a wicker chair so as not to alert neighbors to her presence was not a one-time thing but rather a constant as she hid in attics and half rooms. A large part of her story is hunger. Nearly everyone in Berlin was hungry, and Simon stayed with people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give her food. Her story is emotional, but her narrative is not. She discusses rapes, whether by a “protector” or Russian liberator, almost as asides or inevitabilities. One small ray of hope was her attempt to immigrate to Bulgaria with false papers to marry, though she eventually ran into the ubiquitous Nazi bureaucracy. She did have luck, especially with the Koch family, who supplied her with food and support throughout, and during a two-year respite in 1943, when she stayed with a woman named Luise Blasé. The book also includes a helpful “Index of Names.”
A coolly told story of a harrowing time and a young woman’s struggle to survive.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-38209-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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