Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.
A former inmate of the concentration camp that provided slave labor to Oskar Schindler’s factory informatively recounts the compilation of the businessman’s famous list.
Pemper, who offered key assistance to Schindler in saving the lives of several hundred Jews during the Holocaust, begins by chronicling his childhood in Kraków. It was always an anti-Semitic city, but not until the Nazi occupation of Poland did life for its Jewish residents become intolerable. Chapters on the maneuverings and deception required just to survive during those dark days are stark and dramatic, though similar to those in many other memoirs about the period. What makes the book stand out are the author’s harrowing descriptions of life at the Plaszów concentration camp and his work there. Chosen by camp commandant Amon Göth to be his typist and personal secretary, Pemper’s translation skills and administrative abilities protected him from much of the cruelty inflicted on inmates. He had extensive exposure, however, to the barbaric treatment of others and was later a key witness at Göth’s trial for war crimes. Through the commandant, Pemper came to know Schindler, who used camp personnel in his weapons business. The author lavishly praises Schindler’s humane efforts to rescue his employees and their families, but goes to great length not to deify his friend and savior. Schindler “certainly didn’t come to Kraków as a rescuer,” Pemper writes. “He came as a businessman. But when he saw what was going on in Poland, and how the occupiers were treating us, he decided to do something about it.” Though the author admires Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award–winning film version of Schindler’s List, he details instances in which the director changed facts to make the 1993 film more dramatic. Schindler did not dictate the list of people he wanted from memory as he did in the movie, for example, nor did he show up at Göth’s villa with a suitcase full of cash.
Compelling subject matter rendered in somewhat dry prose, a possible result of the translation.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-286-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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