4 comments about A Visit With the Tomboy Bride: Harriet Backus & Her Friends.

1. While this book was in no way as interesting as Tomboy Bride, it still brought further revelations about Harriet's interactions with the other mining families in their tiny community. It is a good, but not great, backward glance.



2. Harriet Backus's 'Tomboy Bride' is a classic - Read it and skip Duane Smith's commentary - repetitous and adds very little worthwhile new inormation.



3. After a Jeep ride that just happened to go through the Tomboy Mine, I read about Mrs. Backus' book on the Ouray, CO website and ordered it here at Amazon.com. Of course, they recommended this book as well so I ordered it at the same time. Boy am I glad I did. I enjoyed Mrs. Backus' book so much and didn't want it to end. It was great to be able to pick up Professor Smith's book and learn even more about her life.
   
   I swore I would never go up that trail from Telluride again. It is much as Mrs. Backus and Professor Smith wrote and showed-- very scary. But now I want to go back to the Tomboy Mine one more time!



4. Wonderfully illustrated with superbly vintage black-and-white photographs, A Visit With The Tomboy Bride: Harriet Backus & Her Friends is an impressive and inherently interesting collection of the correspondence that took place between Harriet Fish Backus (author of the classic book "Tomboy Bride") and Colorado historian Duane A. Smith. Delving into the adventures of Harriet's life, and exploring a unique picture of an era gone by in the rugged San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado, A Visit With The Tomboy Bride is a unique and enthusiastically recommended contribution to Colorado History reading lists and library collections.

5 comments about Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.

1. I read the book and believed it.NOW IT TURNS OUT TO BE FICTION!!!!
   MORE AMMUNITION FOR THE HOLOCAUST DENIERS.
   IF AMAZON IS TO SELL...PLACE IT IN FICTION PLEASE...!!!!



2. After some investigative reporting by the media, it was discovered that this alleged "true story" of a Holocaust survivor was anything but. The facts? Binjamin Wilkomirski is actually Swiss-born Bruno Grosjean Doessekker, and his experience was about as real as that of the supposed "fellow survivor" who corroborated his story, Laura Grabowski.
   
   How did Grabowski play an indirect role in unmasking the author? She claimed to be an orphan who suffered torture at the hands of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and was later adopted by an American couple, only to have these stories be exposed as equally untrue (her childhood photos show a happy, healthy American girl w/not even hints of the emaciated sate commonly associated w/those who spent time in concentration camps). Additionally, she was revealed to actually be Lauren Stratford, author of the equally fictitious-but-presented-as-a-true-story "Satan's Underground", which detailed her alleged involvement in Satanism and the sexual abuse she endured from the time she was a young girl (something she'd also had a history of lying about since her late teens); as it turns out, "Grabowski" was actually the surname of her maternal grandparents.
   
   Don't the Wilkomirskis and Grabowskis of this world realize that their exploitation of one of the most despicable events in history is not only self-indulgent and unbelievably selfish, but giving credibility to those misguided Holocaust-denying racist groups? Such lies will allow these scumbags to convince the lesser-informed folk out there that the attempted extermination of an entire race was also nothing but lies, which I'm sure never occured to these self-indulgent storytellers as they proceeded to betray countless REAL survivors, who have already suffered enough as it is.



3. Just follow the money trail, the political bantering and incessant self-victimization (which always seems to lead into getting paid one way or another) and you'll see why the most powerful of the jewish lobby (yeah, I'm not afraid to say it) will still ENDORSE IT after it has been proven to be a complete fabrication.
   
   And they wonder why the "extremists" have so much credibility even before people look at all the facts. I've read this book and got a great laugh out of the rediculous claims, and the writings of a man obviously an older version of someone whom would be on the Jerry Springer show today if faced with a different self-victimization issue.
   
   I was already well informed this book was a fabrication in advance, so I can't say "I'm smarter than you all whom were fooled"...heck, even Elie "Weasel" fooled me the first two times around. Looks like his credibility is crap as well. I'mglad I have relatives that were on both sides of WW2; as camp munitions auditor, fitness/activity trainer (A Sergeant's job! He was denied citizenship in US but later came from Canada in about '80), a Luftwaffe infantryman whom both stayed at the conc camps, and himself taken POW when wounded in Belgium (yes many Luft Inf exist so stop emailing me, you don't know history) and a US liberator of Buchenwald...I'm glad REALITY doesnt match the whining stories of crybaby rich jews exiled after the war...so many millions of survivors all rubber-stamping eachothers stories about human soap and lampshades, all proven false by MAINSTREAM science. Like I said, follow the money trail...



4. When I read this book several years ago, I did not understand how anyone could have believed it. Having known several true Holocaust survivors, and heard their stories, I certainly didn't.
   
   Now, there have now been several clear and thorough exposes of the fraud perpetrated by Bruno Grosjean Dossekker, who falsely claimed here to be one Binjamin Wilkomirski, a child survivor of the Holocaust. Stefan Maechler, The New Yorker, 60 Minutes and several other publications prove beyond any doubt that Wilkomirski is no such person and that Fragments is a fiction.
   
   Every possible lead has now been followed; each detail in Dossekker's narration of "events" has been compared with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer, accounts of other child survivors, interviews with members of the Dossekker and Grosjean families and more.
   
   The strongest evidence, unearthed by Stephan Maechler, is the fact that in 1981, Dossekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." Dossekker/Wilkomirski received a third of her estate.
   
   Other evidence includes Dossekker/Wilkomirski's use of Laura Grabowski to "corroborate" his story. Grabowski claims to have known him in a children's home in Krakow. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Underground.
   
   The Social Security number of said Lauren Stratford is the same as that of Grabowski, who subsequently used it to make a false survivor's claim. Furthermore, Satan's Underground and this volume contain startling similarities.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



5. It is in Fragments now, a total hoax.

   A Holocaust survivor memoir that has received prestigious literary awards and lavish praise has been exposed as a hoax.

   In Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Binjamin Wilkomirski describes his ordeal as an infant in the Jewish ghetto of Riga (Latvia), where his earliest memory is of seeing his father being killed. Wilkomirski also tells how he survived the terrible rigors of wartime internment, at the age of three or four, in the German-run concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz.

   First published in German in 1995, Fragments has been translated into twelve languages. In Switzerland, the country where Wilkomirski lives, the book has been a major best-seller. Two documentary films and numerous personal appearances by the author in schools throughout the country have helped promote the memoir.

   The American edition was published by Schocken, an imprint of Random House, which heavily promoted the book with teachers' study guides and other supplementary materials.

   Jewish groups and major American newspapers have warmly praised Fragments. The New York Times called it "stunning," and the Los Angeles Times lauded it as a "classic first-hand account of the Holocaust." It received the 1996 National Jewish Book Award for Autobiography and Memoir, while in Britain it was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize, and in France the Prix Memoire de la Shoah.

   The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC -- a federal government agency -- was so impressed that it sent Wilkomirski on a six-city United States fund-raising tour last fall.

   This past summer, though, compelling evidence came to light exposing Wilkomirski's memoir as an literary hoax.

   Although he claims to have been born in Latvia in 1939, and to have arrived in Switzerland in 1947 or 1948, Swiss legal records show that he was actually born in Switzerland in February 1941, the son of an unwed woman, Yvette Grosjean. The infant was then adopted and raised by the Doessekkers, a middle-class Zurich couple. Jewish author Daniel Ganzfried, writing in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche, also reports that he has found a 1946 photo of the young Bruno Doessekker (Wilkomirski) in the garden of his adoptive parents.

   Comparisons have been drawn between Wilkomirski's Fragments and The Painted Bird, the supposedly autobiographical "Holocaust memoir" by prominent literary figure Jerzy Kosinksi that turned out to be fraudulent.

   Reaction by Jewish Holocaust scholars to the new revelations has been instructive, because they seem more concerned about propagandistic impact than about historical truth. Their primary regret seems merely to be that the fraud has been detected, not that it was perpetrated.

   In an essay published in a major Canadian newspaper (Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 18, 1998), Jewish writer Judith Shulevitz arrogantly argued that it doesn't really matter much if Fragments is authentic. Her main misgiving, apparently, is that the deceit was not more adroit: "I can't help wishing Wilkomirksi-Doesseker [sic] had been more subtle in his efforts at deception, and produced the magnificent fraud world literature deserves."

   Deborah Dwork, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University (Worcester, Mass.), and co-author of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1996), agrees that Fragments now appears to be fraudulent. At the same time, though, she expressed sympathy for Wilkomirski, saying that when she met him he appeared "to be a deeply scarred man." Amazingly, Dwork does not blame him for the imposture, "because she believes in his identity." Instead, she takes the publishers to task for having "exploited" Wilkomirski. (New York Times, Nov. 3, 1998).

   Deborah Lipstadt, author of the anti-revisionist polemic Denying the Holocaust, has assigned Fragments in her Emory University class on Holocaust memoirs. When confronted with evidence that it is a fraud, she commented that the new revelations "might complicate matters somewhat, but [the work] is still powerful."

   Daniel Ganzfried reports that Jews have complained to him that even if Fragments is a fraud, his exposé is dangerously aiding "those who deny the Holocaust."

   American Jewish writer Howard Weiss makes a similar point in an essay published in the Chicago Jewish Star (Oct. 9-29, 1998):

   Presenting a fictional account of the Holocaust as factual only provides ammunition to those who already deny that the horrors of Nazism and the death camps ever even happened. If one account is untrue, the deniers' reasoning goes, how can we be sure any survivors accounts are true ... Perhaps no one was ready to question the authenticity of the [Wilkomirski] account because just about anything concerning the Holocaust becomes sacrosanct.

   Wilkomirski himself has responded to the new revelations by going into hiding, although he did issue a defiant statement describing the climate of discussion about his memoir as a "poisonous" atmosphere of "totalitarian judgment and criticism."

5 comments about Playing for Time.

1. This is the story of a French singer who spent 2± years in a Nazi concentration camp. Saved because of her musical abilities, FF spent her internment as a member of an all-women's orchestra which played for the camp's leaders. It is a strange tale, not especially well or clearly written--essentailly stuff for a holocaust junkey. Compared to Martin Goldsmith's The Unestinquishable Symphony, this book is definitely second tier.



2. The story has been known for many years, but this book puts in focus, by a survivor, the insanity of a lesser known action then the case at Auschwitz. A well told personal experience by someone willing to put down for history something that needed to be said. No matter how many years I've studied, and the many survivors I've known who have shared fragments, this clear telling in print for generations to come is a treasure.



3. This is an absolutely incredible book. An already powerful story it is taken to a new level by the constant reminder that this is first hand experience.

   It is perfect for nearly anyone, the musician will relate to the music, the historian to the accuracy and the avid reader will simply latch on and be unable to let go.

   It brought tears to my eyes.




4. Playing for Time, a grade-A book by Fania Fenelon, is a document not only about the Holocaust, but one that goes deeper: it shows how music brought redemption of spirit in the Hell of Hells. When Fania and her friend are brought to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, she is recognized by a girl in the camp's orchestra as a Parisian caberet singer. She is accepted in to the orchestra, where she is forced to sing the opera Madame Butterfly for the SS. Fania does not let the hardships of the camp take over her spirit, though. She uses music as a weapon, and, as an orchestrator as well as singer for the group, she orchestrates marches by Jews and anti-Nazis right under the noses of her captors, who never catch on. Fania's love of music allows her to survive Auschwitz, and when she is sent with the rest of the "Orchestra Girls" to Bergen-Belsen near the end of the war, her passion for life pulls her through a severe case of typhus. One day she learns that the Nazis are going to shoot the prisoners of Bergen-Belsen at 3:00 that afternoon. The English arrive at the camp at 11:00 that same morning. Fania just barely survived the war, and afterwards she returned to Paris and started again as a caberet singer. She died of cancer in her hometown in 1983. Playing for Time teaches us many things. It teaches us that the human spirit cannot be killed. It teaches us that good always wins over evil. And it teaches us that if you have a love, stick to it. One day it might just save your life.



5. I read this book a number of years ago. It left an indelible mark. It is the story of women survivors in a concentration camp. They literally "played for time," with musical instruments. The movie "Life is Beautiful" brought this book to mind this week. That is why I looked it up. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about courage in the face of adversity. The remarkable will to survive demonstrated by the women portrayed in this book is inspiring and unforgettable.

5 comments about The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident.

1. This was one bound volume of Wiesel's first three books, which concern the Holocaust, survival, and humanity. Night is Wiesel's personal memoir, which relates his personal story before and during World War II, as he and his father are separated from his mother and sister and interned in a series of concentration camps. Dawn is the story of a member of the movement to free Palestine from British occupation and Day concerns how one could move from a past that consumes one's every thought (or even if one should).
   
   Quote: "Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
   
   I read Night in high school, and always think of it as being a particularly long book, which it is not. Wiesel manages to pack more than I would think possible into a little over a hundred pages, which relates the story of himself and his family during the Holocaust. It is a beautifully written work that relates a terrible story. I found the story of Wiesel's loss of faith and the relationship he had with his father particularly memorable. If you somehow missed this in high school, pick it up, if you didn't, find it again. It's worth it. Dawn and Day are not as catching as the first work, but are still interesting in their own way.



2. Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, for his tireless work in addressing the Holocaust, wrestling with its almost incomprehensible moral questions, and most importantly working to ensure that it never happens again. NIGHT, his memoir of his own experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was perhaps the earliest first-hand account to be widely published. Totally authentic, written in blood and tears, it quite defies criticism. To assign four, five, or even ten stars to it would be an obscenity.
   
   And yet Wiesel followed NIGHT by two very short fictional works, novellas rather than novels, called DAWN and DAY. Clearly he wanted to explore issues that could not be addressed in a factual memoir. And these two later books are fascinating in showing Wiesel's first steps as a novelist, rapidly gaining confidence and skill. In this respect alone, I feel that criticism is indeed germane.
   
   We all know the advice to writers: show, don't tell. You can see Wiesel encountering the issue even in NIGHT, which is a mixture of simply reported facts and personal reflection. When he is simply telling his own story, the facts stand by themselves, and even at this date reveal aspects of the Holocaust that I did not understand: for example, why the Jewish communities did not move more proactively to resist their fate, and details of the social interactions among the camp inmates themselves. Occasionally the personal reflections get in the way of relating events, and yet how else is the author to tackle his loss of faith and feelings of guilt which seem to have been a heavier burden than any physical indignities? Wiesel's answer was to turn to fiction.
   
   In his preface to DAWN, Wiesel makes it clear that the protagonist, Elisha, is not the author himself, although he admits that it easily might have been, had he been sent to Palestine rather than France after his liberation from Buchenwald. The fictional Elisha is recruited by freedom fighters trying to oust the British and form the state of Israel. After taking part in several guerilla actions, he is ordered to execute a hostage, a British army captain, in reprisal for the hanging of a Jew. The whole of this slim volume takes place in the night before the execution, and poses the question of whether a man who has escaped the hands of killers can ever be justified in becoming a killer himself. The theme is clearly important, and once more topical, but I cannot say that it works as a novel. The fictional background is sketchy and seems constructed with the sole purpose of presenting this dilemma. A large section of the book is devoted to Elisha's dialogue with ghosts from this past, which further diminishes reality. After a few pages, Wiesel stops showing Elisha through his deeds and social interactions, and concentrates instead on the moral dilemma in his soul; in novelistic terms, the result is to reduce rather than enhance the character's humanity. The book thus comes over less as a novel than as a parable.
   
   DAY (originally published in English as THE ACCIDENT), Wiesel's second attempt at writing a fictional sequel to NIGHT is altogether more successful. This is partly because its theme is less absolute and more subtle: the difficulty of returning to a full loving life for somebody who has lived so long in the realm of death. His quasi-autobiographical protagonist (Eliezer, but the name is mentioned only once) is a rounded character with much depth. The book follows him as he recovers in a New York hospital from a near-fatal encounter with a taxicab. Although we still hear his inner thoughts, his situation is shown primarily in terms of his very real relationships with others, particularly his lover Kathleen. He has clearly led a varied and somewhat successful life in the dozen years since his liberation, but, though no longer a loner in practical matters, he still retains a huge void in his heart. Wiesel introduces quite a lot of psychological suspense, and has the wisdom not to make the ending too facile; if there is healing to come, it will still be a long process.
   
   I have not (yet) read any of Elie Wiesel's later novels. Judging by the speed with which he ascends the learning-curve as a fiction writer here, I would expect them to be increasingly filled out in human terms -- perhaps even to the point where his Nobel Prize might have awarded as much for Literature as for Peace?



3. I was given the first two stories of the trilogy to read in my Nazi Germany and the Holocaust class this year and found them to be excellently written and very meaningful. With the help of an excellent teacher who posed all the right questions I was allowed to see the full meaning of these two stories.
   
   I wasn't able to read the Accident, as my teacher chose for us to read the Sunflower by Simon Weinsenthal instead, although I do hope to someday.
   
   Night and Dawn are two great stories which should be read by all.



4. This was one of the most moving book(s) I have ever read. Everyone should read this at some point in their lives



5. I thought this was a well written memoir and as hard as it was to read it is something that should be read by every living person. We need to step up and not allow this to happen in any country and it is so sad to see it happening everywhere. When will we learn our lessons?

5 comments about From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust.

1. I had a hard time putting this book down. Eichengreen does a good job of telling her story - it wasn't confusing and I didn't come away with a lot of unanswered questions. Obviously someone who didn't experience the Holocaust first hand will never fully appreciate or understand it, but I feel like I gained some insight into through this book.



2. This is a very well written personal story about this most awful period in our world's history.



3. I was extremely impressed with this book. The author decribes in detail her life before anti-semitism and how it started to change. Her story is emotional and touching.

   She was born Celia Landau and changed her name to Lucille. She and her sister Karin were the products of a very close knit family completely torn apart by the Third Reich. Her father gets sent off to a labor camp and a year later they are delivered a box of what supposedly contains his ashes. Eventually Celia, Karin and mother are sent to the Lodz ghetto where surviving is difficult and their mother eventually dies of starvation. Celia's account of this is very sad and moving. She then tells a story of a tender love affair with Szaja in the ghetto, and befriends an elderly couple named Jules and Julius who ironically after liberation, she winds up marrying their son when she moves to New York.

   She and her sister Karin are then sent to Auschwitz. Poor Karin is so devastated and having trouble surviving day to day after losing both her parents. Celia's heart is again broken when Karin is not chosen in the selection and is loaded up into a truck and never seen again.

   Celia is only weeks away from death when Auschwitz gets liberated. She goes into detail her life after the camps including her testimony during war crimes trials that helped put many of the SS in prison.

   She also tells her experiences of going back to Europe in 1991 for the first time since she left. The hostility and indifference against Jews was still alive.

   This book is highly recommended. Well written.




4. How Cecelia (aka Lucille) survived is beyond imagination. What determination.



5. As a child in Hamburg, Germany, Celia Landau led a cultured and privileged life. Her father Benjamin had a study full of books and frequently entertained renowned visitors, including philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Paul Holzer. This began to unravel when the Nazis came to power. In the summer of 1934, the family traveled to a German spa in Bad Schwartau. As their visit ended, the spa's owner gleefully announced that Hitler would deal with the Jews. The next fall, nine-year-old Celia's grades began to falter as former school friends labeled her "Drechtjude." In 1937, the family were forced out of their condominium at Hohe Weide 25. In October, 1938, her father was carted to prison, then deported to Dachau. In February 1941, a Gestapo agent deliver his "ashes" in a cigar box.

   Eight months later, Celia, now 16, was deported with her mother Sala and sister Karin to Lodz. Here they shared an unheated room on Zgierska Street with Julie and Julius Eichengreen and five others. As the vast majority of Jews were shipped like cattle from Lodz, the couple made Celia promise, if ever she went to New York, to find their son, who had left Europe years earlier. On July 13, 1942, Celia's starving and sick mother Sala died.

   Before being herself deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, Celia starved and scraped to survive, and lost her sister Karin as well. Her one friend from that period, Elli Sabin, traveled with her in the final transport from Lodz to new horrors. Here she came face to face with the dreaded Dr. Mengele, slaved for some months in an outdoor construction site at the Neuengamme subcamp and in the Blom and Foss Shipyards. In October, she was transferred to Arbeitslager Sasel. Here, to gain access to important files, she promised to transfer her family's house in Altona-Luna Park outside Hamburg to an SS guard. The ploy worked, and she memorized the names and addressed of 42 Nazi guards.

   In March 1945, Celia Landau was again transferred, this time to Bergen-Belsen, the disease-ridden camp where Anne Frank and her sister died of Typhus. Fortunately for Laudau, a month later, the camp was liberated, on April 15, 1945. Here she told a British major of her exploit, and was swiftly introduced to Lieutenant-Colonel J.H. Tilling, of Britain's War Crimes Investigations unit. When friends Elli, Hela Dimand and Sabina Zarecki corroborated her story, the British swiftly transferred Celia Landau to Hanover Germany, where she helped bring 17 Nazis to justice.

   Her assistance to the British War Crimes unit gave Celia new opportunities. What she did with them is but one of the things that makes this book fascinating. This is the story of an extraordinary woman who sought revenge only through her own good deeds.

   The one thing missing from this book is what gave her the courage to go on. Alyssa A. Lappen

5 comments about From A Name to A Number: A Holocaust Survivor's Autobiography.

1. We had the privilege of having Mr. Alter Wiener visit our elementary school and meet with our 5th and 6th grade students to share his story. His visit culminated a unit of study the children had engaged in to learn about the Holocaust and the reality of hate, bigotry and it's results. Our children were very solemn as they listened to Mr. Wiener's story. Afterwards, many asked questions about his experience and memories these many years later.
   
   Mr. Wiener has written a book of his experiences, losses, and journey through an earth bound hell that every adult should read to be better informed about Hitler's atrocities on mankind. This book presents a story from someone who was there and is written in an honest and comprehensive manner. In his book, Mr. Wiener answers a question for a student who asked, "how is it that you have that constant smile?" Mr. Wiener responded, "My smiling face does not indicate that my heart stopped bleeding. In fact, it has indeed been bleeding for the last sixty-seven years. I am just sending a message to Hitler and to those who had been following his racist ideology that Nazis' plan to stop me breathing at the age of thirteen did not materialize. At the age of eighty, I am still breathing and smiling."
   
   "From a Name to a Number" is appropriate for older students and could easily be part of a high school reading list. It should definitely be one of those books that all freedom loving adults should read.



2. Alter Weiner is a very special person and it was a very special book. We "The Bad Girls Book Club" read together and he came with pictures and spoke to our club even though we were quite small. It was a horrifying experience and he tells it without bitterness and even some humor. If ever you want to realize how lucky we are in America and this time period you need to read this book.



3. Alter Wiener's book, "From A Name To A Number" is a message of survival, hope, love and forgiveness. It is a prominent and important work of history that all should read. It not only puts a personal face on the Holocaust, but reveals the horrors of Hitler to the generations who came after the war. I believe this book should be mandatory reading in our school system.



4. Besides the previous comments listed in the other reviews, I would like to add what Alter means to me: He is one of the increasingly rare examples of living history.
   
   Alter is someone from another time and place who is here with us now, reporting first-hand about not only the horrors of war, but about the extreme and unique horrors this war included which surpases other conflicts. Is it possible to fully understand this? No, it takes a survivor's account to show us. And Alter Wiener is with us as a guide into one of the worst times in history.
   
   He is a resource for teaching us and reminding us not to forget. Not to forget, so this doesn't happen again.



5. Mr. Wiener possesses many gifts, foremost of which is his ability to connect with people. I have seen him face Junior High School audiences, many to whom he is the first Jewish person they have ever met, and hold them spellbound as he recounts his life with compassion, humor, and wisdom. I have seen him embraced by those same students and their teachers afterward. Reading this book one feels the same connectedness, as he is a wonderful storyteller who can draw readers into his complex past.
   I was most moved by some of the many letters he has received from listeners and readers of all ages which are included in this book. You will experience a profound sense of hope as you read them.

5 comments about The Sergeant in the Snow.

1. A slightly different perspective makes this novella unique. The thread of a soldier on the eastern front in the cold Russian winter is a common one but this time it is based on the memoirs of an Italian. A good and quick read.



2. Mario Rigoni Stern's slim memoir of his World War Two experiences sheds light on the effective destruction of the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano (CSIR) in Russia, which is perhaps one of the lesser-known events of the Eastern Front and of the entire war itself. As a personal narrative, Stern's view is from the ground and he offers little or no strategic view of how these events came to pass. This however, adds to the book because as a grunt--even in a position roughly equivalent to an American platoon sergeant of today--he wouldn't have had much access to or inclination to see the war in such a manner.
   
   Plenty of combat abounds through the short tale. Particularly once Stern and his fellows realize the entire front is collapsing and that they're caught in a "bag," slang for encirclement by the Soviets, the fighting becomes fierce. It is interesting to read the accounts of Italians, Germans, Hungarians and other taking part together in desperate attacks to break out of the Axis Powers' first epic disaster on the Eastern Front.
   
   Throughout the book courses one vein of thought that is ever-present in Stern and his soldiers: survival. "Shall we ever get home?" one soldier asks of Stern every time he sees him. "Which direction is Italy in?" others asks from the middle of the frozen steppes. And as the situation deteriorates during the long retreat westwards, Stern constantly commands and reminds the men to "always stick together." Alas, as these memoirs always illustrate, many do not make it home.
   
   A short but good work covering the Italian experience in World War Two, Stern tells his tale of the Italian Army's fortunes as seen and lived through by one of its peasant and elite Alpini soldiers.



3. very spontaneous and genuine story, of young people catapulted across Europe for no reason, and still performing their duties and trying to be human. you can rely feel the soldiers pain and the bitter russian winter with the words used by the author.



4. The words in the title are those of one of the author's close comrades-in-arms in the Tridentina Division, which had been attached to the Italian 8th Army on the western bank of the Don in 1942. In December of that year, the Romanians on the left flank of the Tridentines buckled under a strong Soviet offensive, and the Italians found themselves suddenly enveloped. Ordered to withdraw on 19 December, the Italians, along with Romanian and Hungarian remnants and remnants of the German 298th Infantry Division, marched west through icy wind, snowstorms and heavy drifts in an attempt to break out of the pocket. Sergeant in the Snow is a vivid first-person account of the story of this macabre odyssey up to the climactic Battle of Nikolajewka on 26 January 1943 and its aftermath.
   
   Rigoni's memoir is at once urgent, tragic, heroic and poetic. He relays the essence of the Italian spirit, so different from that of the stern and disciplined Germans, and recounts in flowing narrative and earthy dialogue exactly what it was like to march, hungry and exhausted, over 300 miles in the Russian winter. Rigoni divides his memoir into two parts: (1) the Strongpoint, wherein he tells the story of his division's struggle to repulse Soviet thrusts on the Don, and (2) the Bag, wherein he tells the story of the breakout from the pocket (the bag). As mentioned above, the climax of the action, and there is plenty of that here, takes place on the memorable 26th of January when the Italians and Germans defeat, at terrible cost, three Soviet divisions at Nikolajewka and finally break out of the encirclement: "My men hesitate, hold back, one or two of them are already wounded, and I shout: 'Come on.' I too hesitate a bit, but we're in it now, whatever happens."
   
   In the midst of battle chaos and the fog of war at Nikolajewka, one of those inexplicable and mysterious episodes occurs when the famished Rigoni enters an isba only to find a group of Russian soldiers there: "They're armed. With the red stars on their caps. My rifle's in my hand. I look at them, turned to stone. They're eating round a table, taking the food with a wooden spoon from a common bowl. And they look at me with their spoons held in mid-air....There are also some women. One takes a plate, fills it with milk and meal and offers it to me with a spoon from the common bowl....No one breathes a word. The only sound is of the spoon in my plate; and of each of my mouthfuls....The Russian soldiers watch me go out, without moving."
   
   Kudos to Northwestern University Press for bringing this remarkable book to light again. Unfortunately, the book is small and the print small, too. The translator's grammar and mechanics are somewhat archaic, and there is the glaring, almost unforgivable, absence of any maps. Dialogue should be rendered in alternating paragraphs as each character speaks, thus reducing the possibility of the reader's being confused. Although there are some footnotes along the way, this excellent memoir would certainly benefit from a thorough re-edit to include many more. In spite of these publishing flaws, The Sergeant in the Snow is a far better memoir than Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier and as good as Bidermann's In Deadly Combat. Highly recommended.



5. I am shocked to find the great many people who are unaware of Mussollinni's ill-fated pursuit of glory in the east. His broken dreams left many Italian families orphaned and widowed. This well written account of the brutality of combat on the Eastern front is a fine addition to any WW2 eastern front library. It is well written and fascinating.

2 comments about William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony (Mayborn Literary Nonfiction).

1. This is a well-written and riveting story of love, endurance, suffering and God's provision. The explanations of the atrocities committed by the Nazis to William, Rosalie, their families and friends is horrible and hard to absorb, but reading it is only a fraction of the pain that these two brave people endured.
   
   Having met, listened to and visited with both William and Rosalie, I can attest to the scars that they carry as well as the passion they have for sharing their stories with others. They continually re-open old wounds by telling people what happened to them in hopes that the true story of the Holocaust will never be ignored or forgotten.
   
   I strongly encourage you to get this book, read it, and learn from it. We must NEVER FORGET.



2. "William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony" is the personal story of William and Rosalie Schiff who were a young couple struggling to stay alive during the Nazi holocaust in which German antisemitism motivated the torture and murder of their families, friends, and neighbors. Now both in their eighties and living in Dallas, Texas, their story is effectively and accurately narrated by Craig Hanley is a seminal biography detailing their experiences, the loss of their families, their years of torture at the hands of their Nazi captors, and their struggle to find each other after the war ended. This is a riveting, harrowing, dramatic, true story, the stuff of which block buster movies and television mini-series are made from. "William & Rosalie" is a welcome and informative addition to the growing body of Holocaust literature, made even more valuable as the survivors of that generation are now dying off and the attempts by neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and Islamic anti-Semites at denying the Holocaust are continuing unabated. Enhanced with family photographs, a 'Key to Inter-Chapter Photos', and a selected bibliography of suggested further readings, "Williams & Rosalie" is particularly distinguished by an underlying message warning of the dangers of prejudice and ethnic hatred. Now academic or community library should fail to include a copy of "William & Rosalie" in the Judaic Studies or Holocaust Studies reference collections.

5 comments about Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943.

1. I'll read this book over and over, I am sure - three times already in a day and a half. The first time I tried to focus on the historical scholarship and impeccable method, but was distracted by thoughts of "But why? Why? It doesn't make sense. They were Germans too."
   
   Again I read it, and was arrested this time by the mechanistic system set up by the Nazis in what was really quite a short time. Every Jew's (and every other citizen's) address was on a card somewhere - every detail of their life was a part of a huge network by means of which all people of a certain category could be swept up with little or no warning with chilling efficiency, and sent away. Then their property was listed, valued, distributed to 'more deserving' citizens, and the state itself recovered every last drop of value from those it had discarded - down to retrieving their security deposits from the gas and electricity companies to be paid into general revenue. Those companies even printed for their own use forms for particularising the amount of the deposit, any unrecovered bills, and any remainder to be sent to the State.
   
   Then, at the third attempt little Marion and her family took all my attention, despite my efforts to resist them, and I wept. This book is quite accessible to any general reader, and Marion Samuel, thanks to the efforts of Gotz Aly, could take her place beside Anne Frank in the lists of books for young folk to read, for slightly different reasons. Anne Frank shows us her own growth and maturity, as well as the effect on others of the horror outside their hiding place. Marion's story is not in her won words, but it shows starkly the power a state apparatus can gather to itself and use to crush parts of its population it takes a dislike to. Would that there had been more of the kind of German described in "Into the tunnel" when a young girl was told forcefully by her father that the sight of Jews being deported was something that struck home at all other Germans, because it could be Catholics like their family next.



2. One of the abiding insights that comes through in Goetz Ally's Into the Tunnel is just how efficient bureaucracies can be at transforming vibrantly alive human beings into impersonal statistics on official forms. In their extermination program, the Nazis, with an eerie fidelity to record-keeping, felt the need to document every detail of the lives they were destroying. That's why Aly is able to trace the unhappy fate of the beautiful little girl, Marion Samuel, who is the protagonist of this unhappy tale.
   
   Such exercises are important; they help to keep memory alive. But Aly's book is more of a model of historical research than a sustained biography that captures who Marion Samuel was. This is as it must be. Nazi documentation records dates when the Samuel family loses its business, moves from one locale to another, and is rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz, but little else. There are few photographs left, and family memories on both Cilly's (Marion's mother) and Ernst's (her father) side have dimmed (or were outright obliterated by the Holocaust). So what we have in this book is a lot of data that leaves us with the sinking awareness that the 12-year old Marion simply disappeared in a wide ocean of bureaucratic files and forms even before she was murdered and incinerated at Auschwitz.
   
   Still, we get glimpses of her, and those glimpses are all the more poignant for being so incomplete. One of her schoolmates recalls that in 1938, a full five years before her murder, an 8-year old Marion was already feeling the burden of the Nazi horror. She remembers (p. 82) that at one point a near-hysterical Marion blurted out her fear that Jews were disappearing into an ominous tunnel. We also know that at the final roundup, Marion was separated for three full days from her parents, and sent to a detention warehouse full of equally parentless children. Marion's mother, Cilly, was sent on to Auschwitz and quite likely was immediately murdered. Marion and her father Ernst were reunited in the same transport that took them both to Auschwitz. One can only imagine the forlornness Marion experienced before she was reunited with her father for their final journey into the tunnel. Both were murdered a week later.
   
   It's good that Aly's work allows us to know something of a child, unspeakably murdered before she barely had a chance to live, who otherwise would've totally disappeared.



3. this was a very moving book. I kept thinking during the book. how could anybody murder 1.5 million children and where were the alleged good people. why did not our country do a great deal more to save the jews of europe. the USA could have saved every jew in germany, austria and czechoslovakia if the state dept. had not been run by anti-semetic officials.



4. This is a book could've been written by Sophie Scholl, from the White Rose Movement, from heaven-almighty.
   
   I cannot bequeath the tragic nature of how I came to understand this "statistic" but in all due seriousness, why not a statistical analysis of the nearly 2 million dead or wounded, you have to remember, that Iraq and Aftanistan, although it maims, scars and is a horrifying Nazi conquest, particularly Iraq, the Holy Roman Empire lives on, just as the slaughter continues, for all Buddhist protesters in Tibet, and anyone with half a brain, can figure this out: this book is a euphemism for the hatred that sparks wars and all sorts of pogroms, including that of being disabled, very similar to being Jewish, in Nazi Germany.
   
   I highly hated Hitler, until he dies, briefly, very briefly with enough time I have to commute across the internet to show my mother this beautiful book, but I hate him present-tense, as I have no money, to buy it for her.



5. Marion Samuel was eleven years old when she arrived at Auschwitz in March of 1943, she was gassed to death the same day and her body burned in the crematorium. He ashes were thrown into a pit with hundreds of others and then covered over with soil. Their is no marker over where she died.
   
   But who was this child and what was her crime that she should be treated so. She came from a lower middle class family from West Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea where the German-Polish border is today. At the age of six she was a witness to Kristallnacht and forbidden to go to the German Public School she had attended for the last three years. He family lost their business and both her parent's became "unskilled" factory workers. Marion was able to go to a "Jewish" school for two more years, before those were shut down. For the last years of her life she lived in a one room ground floor apartment off an alley. Since her parent's were away each day, she had to fill her time as best she could.
   
   How did she view the world she lived in? Did she wonder why she and her parents were being treated the way they were? Did she have any understanding that she was being punished for a random act of birth? At least we know she was on the same train as her father (who lasted sixty one days in the camp) when she was "evacuated". Thankfully, the horrors at the end for this little girl were tempered by the comfort of a parent.
   
   Hopefully, the people that ordered her death, and carried it out, suffered for what they did.

5 comments about A Bag of Marbles.

1. A bag of marbles was pretty good. If you are looking for an educational book about wwII and want to escape the gore, this is the book for you. It gets a little slow, but you really do find yourself caring for theses two boys. Plus, it is non-fiction.



2. The story is about two young boys : Joe and Maurice, they are French and Jews, it's in Paris during world War 2. So they must avoid. they went to the south, near the Italian border.
   The story is touching and well writing, but sometimes it's very boring, because there isn't a lot of action.



3. Kudos to the translator for keeping the author's words & spirit in tact in this heroic and moving testimonial about what it took to survive the Holocaust & what we all must do to keep other holocausts from happening again. In his own words, "be brave, know how to take care of yourself, don't rely on others, don't let your emotions get the better of you, take responsibility." Clearly, this title is a story that will encourage & remind young readers to always remember and to take responsibility.



4. This is a beautiful book that tells the true story of two young Jewish boys on the run from the Gestapo in war-torn France. The author, Joseph Joffo is never nostalgic about the ordeal he and his brother went through in their bid to escape the Death Camps of Nazi Germany. He writes from the heart but he writes with purpose. His story is a warning to future generations never to take their lives for granted. A Bag of Marbles is a fantastic book that should be on the shelves of every school in the world, just to remind future generations that life is not always a bed of roses...



5. this book made me want to read more. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. You are really rooting for the boys to come out of this entire oredeal alright.+