Because of the variety of the author’s experiences and the power of their expression here, if you could only read one...
Ably translated, this is an extraordinary Holocaust memoir wherein a young Czech woman undergoes a dizzying variety of hellish experiences.
Published in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, this volume is a clinic on the varieties of torture that one could undergo as a Jew during the Nazi period. Young Ruth was steeled for loss early in life as a child of divorced parents. This girl who enjoyed music and skiing soon found herself in a long line of Jews delivering all valuables (especially money, jewelry, musical instruments, and radios) to the new Gestapo authorities. The family managed to hide out on a farm with gentiles for many months, but their resources ran out and the Gestapo closed in, forcing the family to the camp Theresienstadt, where conditions were occasionally livable thanks to periodic visits by the Red Cross. But inmates suffered all the more when their meager calorie allotment dropped back to starvation level. To her credit, young Ruth volunteered as a nurse, even though her duties required more removal of corpses than relieving anyone’s suffering. While bedridden herself with fever, she married her ghetto policeman boyfriend. Elias, soon pregnant, was then transferred to Auschwitz, where pregnancy was a certain death sentence. Her attending physician turned out to be none other than the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, who spared her life because he wanted to see how long an unfed baby could live. The most pathetic lines in this moving memoir are a soliloquy by this young mother who must kill her newborn for a chance of survival: “My child...you can’t even whimper anymore.” Elias is ultimately tapped for forced labor, allowing her to survive to see the Third Reich crumble and eventually begin a family in Palestine.
Because of the variety of the author’s experiences and the power of their expression here, if you could only read one Holocaust memoir—this should be the one.Pub Date: May 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-471-16365-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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