A riveting tale of the previously unknown and fascinating story of the unsung angels who strove to foil the Final Solution.
Beyond the well-known work of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, Wallace (The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich, 2003) sets out to tell the story of the staggering network built by a Swiss-based rescue group.
This small band worked tirelessly, giving of their lives and fortunes to save the Jews interned by the Nazis. Working with and against unbelieving ministers of Allied countries, Zionists and anti-Zionists, Orthodox and secular Jews, Catholics, outcasts, and even some Nazis, they saved tens of thousands of lives. Desperate attempts to convince the Allies to help—even to bomb railway lines to Auschwitz—met with nothing but frustration, as they were told that the priority was to win the war, not save lives. Even the Red Cross claimed that the Nazi treatment of Jews was an internal matter. The mutual suspicion and traditional divisions between secular and religious Jewish communities provided rifts that unfortunately often undermined some of their valiant attempts. Though many of the names will be unfamiliar to most readers—Recha and Isaac Sternbuch, Gerhart Riegner, Jean-Marie Musy, Joel Brand, Rudolf Kasztner—their work was indispensable, and the author brings them to well-deserved light. From physically saving refugees in Switzerland to providing false passports and visas to Italy or China, even a few to Palestine, small efforts grew into a larger, wider, and more desperate movement. In Slovenia, organizers hatched a plan to ransom prisoners, and the connection of a Finnish osteopath brought them to Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust. Himmler knew, as many Nazis did but were terrified to admit, that the war was lost. Himmler attempted to work with them to close the camps, but his fear of Hitler was palpable. Throughout, Wallace introduces readers to a host of inspiring heroes, most of whom were quiet and unassuming yet intensely dedicated to saving European Jewry.
A riveting tale of the previously unknown and fascinating story of the unsung angels who strove to foil the Final Solution.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3497-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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