1 comments about The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories.

1. I knew very little, if anything, about the book or its Polish author. What captured my attention was the subtitle of the book "And Other True Stories".
   
   "The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories" (260 pages) brings us 12 stories that in one way or another are connected to the Holocaust. Sometimes the story will be a straightforward account of a Holocaust survivor. At other times, the story ends up in places you'd never thought. For example, "The Back of the Eye", the longest of the 12 stories, initially concentrates on Stanislaw W., a concentration camp survivor, but eventually shifts to his son Stefan, who joined the Red Army Faction and is serving a lifetime sentence in Germany for his involvement in a brutal abduction with killings.
   
   I obviously cannot speak for Hahha Krall's original writing style in Polish, but in this translation it comes across with a very peculiar style. It is dry, at times emotionnaly removed, yet very observant. Writing about a young Jewish boy who fears he might haven eaten non-kosher food: "'You're only eight years old', his aunt consoled him. 'After you are bar mitzvah, God will forgive you everything'. He calculated that he could sin for five more years. Unfortunately, the war began before his bar mitzvah; God forgave him nothing."
   
   The author does a great job in keeping you guessing where the stories will take you. While I lost interest in 2 of the 12 stories, hence no 5 star rating, this book is not only a great read, but of course also a reminder of the incredible horrors of the Holocaust. Highly recommended.

No comments about Things We Couldn't Say: A dramatic account of Christian resistance in Holland during WWII.

5 comments about Shoah: Journey from the Ashes : A Personal Story of Triumph over the Holocaust.

1. I listened to Cantor Leo Fettman speak 12 years ago and I will never forget what he talked about. He described and gave a face to the holocaust for me I was born in the 70's and was not even alive when all this had happened. My knowledge was from books and classes (so very limited). What he said 12 years ago and his book showed me the most was hope. If a person can endure what he did and do so much good and have so much hope how can any of us not have hope for the future. This book should be required reading for all people.



2. this book is so well written, i had dreams about being in the holocaust after i read it.



3. My name is Dusty Baldwin I feel that the book "Shoah" is an excelent book.Because it discribes what happend during the Holocaust.This book deplicts the good times and the bad times of the Holocaust.The book also tells how the Jews were rounded up and put on trains and treated like animals.The book was written from a survivors story.The good thing about this book is that it tells you excactly what happend in the death camps and at the concentration camps.I would recommend this book to anyone from the age of 12 and up read this book to find out what the government didn't tell you.



4. Loved this book. In fact, I couldn't put it down. I read it in one afternoon. I found it to be well written and informative.



5. "I have read many books on the Holocaust, including survivors' own testimonies, yet this is the first book that enlightened my awareness as to how long anti-Semitism has been in existence. I would gladly recommend to anyone to read this book as it goes beyond the Holocaust and into humanity."

   Rebecca Herren, Editor The Jewish Reporter

5 comments about Defy the Darkness: A Tale of Courage in the Shadow of Mengele.

1. Defy The Darkness is the story of the author's (Joe Rosenblum) life before, during, and after World War II. After the Germans invaded Poland, he was, due to his Aryan looks, able to survive by working on the farm of a Polish family who were very kind to him. As a result, he was able to bring food to his own family which helped to prolong their lives. Rosenblum was a very remarkable man. He took his father's place on various slave labor details, he spent time with Russian partisans, and he survived around eighteen months in Birkenau at a time when the average person might have survived eighteen minutes. He had wits; he had strength of character, and, as with most camp survivors he had, as odd as this may sound, luck on his side. The two most indelible images in the book; the gauntlet that the prisoners were continually forced to run at Majdanek, and the prisoners at Birkenau stuffing whole frogs in their mouths due to their incredible hunger. This is a story that had to be told and a book that must be read.



2. This book is fantastic. Joe Rosenblum's story is inspiring. I have shared this book with many people and every one of them found the book intriguing. Mr. Rosenblum went through hell and emerged a hero and a very decent man. Very well written with co-author Mr. Kohn.



3. This book was a page turner that I could not put down. It went straight to my heart and I wondered if I could do the same things to survive. Joe's thoughts and actions were absolutely amazing, thinking about my 14 yr old nephew the whole time. Unimaginable acts of bravery and the things he has to overcome just to stay alive. Giving kindness to anyone he could even though it could mean death in an instant. Watching and telling his stories of death all around him and of his family. The work he had to endure, the pain, and the hopes to keep him going.

   This book is an excellent read and really opens your eyes to his life and the lives around him.




4. There is no shortage of writing about the Holocaust, fortunately, because nothing so evil should ever be forgotten. In addition to the dry historical accounts, we have many novels, military assessments and first-person accounts.
   What Joe Rosenblum gives us is a closeup look at his hometown of Miedzyrzec, Poland, as it is swallowed up by the Nazis, the effects on its mostly Jewish population and the terrible events that upend and destroy his family. Equally important, he tells us how he survived his hellacious odyssey through Nazi death camps, his techniques for survival and the pure luck that kept him from destruction.
   I found the writing a little choppy and some of the material was a bit repetitious. The book sometimes read more like an interview with someone eager to spill out the details before it's too late. So what? This is not literature, this is humanity, set down on paper so that we'll all remember and, if we're lucky, have just a little of the courage of this survivor.



5. This book is one of the best suvivor accounts I have read. The authot lets you into his life and lets you see things through his eyes. Once you are in - it's hard to leave. The author has such an amazing memory of his life that the pages beg to be read. I happen to have been fortunate enough to meet Mr. Rosenblum and hear him tell his story to my students. Truly an amazing man. I highly reccomend this book for it's truth, honesty and heroism.

1 comments about Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust.

1. Samuel Drix was a physician in Lvov, was one of the great Jewish communities of pre-war Poland, whose fate under the Nazis was one of the worst and yet gets little attention from historians. Drix was caught in a roundup and sent to the Janowska camp on the outskirts of the city. This camp left few survivors. Run by some of the most vicious commandants, Janowska had hardly an equal in the brutal treatment of its prisoners. Drix's memoir is unusual for several other reasons. It is one of the few accounts of a professional; it gives a vivid glimpse into the conditions in the Lvov ghetto as well as in the camp and it tells of Drix's remarkable escape from certain death and his subsequent , quite startling, experiences among Polish and Ukranian peasants in the countryside where he survived in hiding until the end of the war.

No comments about Searching for Schindler: A memoir.

2 comments about The Blessed Abyss: Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women.

1. Ravensbruck stood out among German concentration camps as gender specific: only women were imprisoned there. Perhaps for this reason, it has suffered from historical neglect, despite the fact that its inmates were often extremely important members of resistance movements in France, Germany and throughout Europe. By translating this extremely important memoir of Nanda Herbermann, known and taught widely in Germany, the Baers have made an important first step in telling the history of Ravensbruck. Baer's scholarly introduction frames the memoir from many angles--women in the holocaust, the new woman, the Catholic Church and the Nazis and wartime resistance. This is an important book for scholars of the twentieth century, and would make an excellent choice for teaching Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the Holocaust. It would also fit well in courses on women's autobiography.



2. What do you think of whenever you hear the word, "Holocaust?" If you are like me, you think of German concentration camps and the Jews. It came as a complete surprise to me that Roman Catholic Aryan German could land in one of their "own"camps. This is exactly what happened to Nanda Herbermann, a German living in Munster. As an editor and writer for The Grail, her parish publication, Herbermann and parish priest, Father Muckermann, were part of the German, Catholic resistance to the Nazis. For this, Muckermann was forced to flee Germany; Herbermann was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated at Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women. In her own words, penned in "The Blessed Abyss, Inmate #6582 in Ravensbruck Concentration Camp for Women," we receive from Herbermann a detailed account of the horrors of her daily life, but from a very different perspective than Jewish accounts. Here is a woman who was brought up as an Aryan, with Aryan views, who slowly softens and revises her attitude toward Jews, lesbians, prostitutes and all other minorities imprisoned in Ravensbruck as she is thrown in among them and faced with the realities of their mutual hardships. Her incredulity that this is happening to her, that these atrocities are committed by her beloved, fellow Germans is a crushing blow. It is truly her faith that carries her through these daily "stations of the cross." This compelling reading is enhanced by Hester and Elizabeth Baer's meticulously written Preface and Introduction. Here she provides the reader with a detailed history of the Catholic Church's involvement with the Nazis, Herbermann's life and family, and a provocative discussion of women and the Holocaust. This is truly eye-opening, ground breaking reading that I consider imperative to any scholar of the Holocaust or someone who wants to read "the rest of the story."

5 comments about Literature or Life.

1. Literature or Life by Jorge Semprun
   
   This is a great book. Like Semprun's previous book on World War II, "What a Beautiful Sunday," this one uses his experience in Nazi concentration camps to tell a quite remarkable story (and stories within stories within stories), but also as a jumping-off place for wide-ranging musing about life, and art, and the dependency of each on the other (hence the apt title).
   
   The book circles around the liberation of Buchenwald and the first few weeks afterwards, with extended forays into his experiences there, previous experiences with the French underground as a student at the Sorbonne, and with a lot of discussion of writers and philosophers along the way.
   
   He starts by addressing the question of whether an experience like being in Buchenwald can be truly and fully addressed in literature - he says yes, certainly, given enough skill and commitment by the writer. Finding readers who are capable of comprehending and believing what is written is the problem. I think we have a good writer/reader match here, because I find Semprun to be startling in his clarity, illuminating, riveting and very funny from time to time (a sense of humor and absurdity that obviously served him well, and those that leaned on him for support well, too).
   
   There is a bizarrely funny scene at the opening of the book, for example, when three British soldiers, brand new to the scene in Buchenwald walked up to him, and he was so happy to see them ("I felt more like laughing, gamboling in the woods, running from tree to tree") that he tried to engage them in what was, for him, normal conversation ("Say, I bet you fellas are noticing how quiet it is here - it's the birds! The smell of the crematory has driven them off, so the usual racket you hear in the forest just ain't happening here!") - Meanwhile these soldiers are staring at him in open-mouthed horror, as if he was a talking corpse, some kind of zombie... It takes Semprun a few minutes to figure out what the problem is here, and he decides, on reflection, that their perception is correct - that he and his comrades, the survivors, are a sort of zombie, that they hadn't really avoided death - that death and what he calls "radical evil" were so pervasive in the camp that nobody there survived in the usual sense - and he said that for the rest of his life, much of it as a younger man spent continuing to put himself in danger as a revolutionary fighter of various kinds, he felt an odd sort of invulnerability - an assumption that he would not be killed or even caught because he'd already been there, and somehow been given a pass to return to finish his business here.
   
   One of his extended side trips is a discussion of Heidegger, of whom he says, in part, "Of course, there was a certain fascination - sometimes mixed with irritation - with the philosopher's language. With that abounding obtuseness through which one has to hack one's way, cutting clearings without ever reaching a definitive clarity. A never-ending labor of intellectual decipherment that becomes absorbing through its very incompletion."
   
   It seems clear to me that Semprun used his experience with Heidegger partially as a guide in his own development as a thinker and writer, because, again - he writes with exceptional clarity, and no matter how far afield his musings range, he never loses the thread or the point of a remarkable and essential story in the process.



2. Jorge Semprun spent two years in a concentration camp, Buchenwald. He was a known writer before and continued to be a writer afterwards. In this reflection on his life experience he reveals himself to be first of all a true human being , the Yiddish word is 'mensch' and it applies to him though he is not Jewish. Semprun's meditation on the meaning of his writing and the meaning of his life is a moving one, and a unique one. He is an original person with a way of thinking and understanding things of his own. Who reads this book will get to know a mind and a human being of unique distinction.



3. Jorge Semprún is one of the many survivors of the Holocaust who has left his memoirs written to the later generations. But what makes him different is the fact that he did not wrote just what he saw or lived: he wanted us readers to know the feelings, the thoughts and the worries that accompanied and still accompany a Buchenwald prisoner as well. Their words are not hateful to the Germans, nor show pity or regret towards the writer himself or his former fellows. Semprún does not analyze tha causes or the consecuences of his experience, he seems more to go through them once again, but from a diferent point of view: that of the free men. From there, he tries to explain things; not in a very reasonable or settled order, but simply as they come to his mind. The structure of the book reminds that of our own memories: fragmented, realistic, or perhaps a little more distant as time goes by; uncomplete. That lack of organisation makes the book even more sincere and pure, while still keeping a beautiful prose to tell the most amazing horrors.
   A must for anyone who is interested in the Holocaust and its survivors, who are fading silently as time goes on.



4. In this elegant piece of literary philosophy, Semprun treats readers to an extraordinarily rich remembrance of two years in Buchenwald. This work is shot through with memories of his life before, during and after the war and references to many of the thinkers and writers he has known. Passages as delicate as lace adorn chapters sound as bedrock. You could do much worse than to build a set of Holocaust readings on this foundation.

   One aspect making this an especially vibrant Holocaust testimony is that Semprun is not Jewish. While he approaches the subject of Jewish suffering with sympathy, gravity and deep respect, his reminiscences are framed by a lifetime of learning and an important non-Jewish perspective. Readers taste the suffering Semprun has experienced through continuing memories and glimpse what must have driven celebrated Jewish survivors like Paul Celan, Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski to suicide.

   Another laudable feature is Semprun's sure knowledge that in politics, as in everything, there is such a thing as paramount Evil, to which philosophers like Heidegger contributed. Deep thinking alone does not, according to his view, constitute righteousness. Semprun elegantly examines ends and means as well as thought processes, dramatically dismissing the moral relativism common among intellectuals these days.

   Despite the difficult subject matter, I found this work highly educational--and eminently hopeful and uplifting. Alyssa A. Lappen




5. Jorge Semprun was born in Spain and while studying philosophy in Paris, he was arrested. Accused of being member of the resistance, he was sent to Buchenwald where he spent 18 months before the camp was liberated. "Literature or Life" is his account of what it meant to survive Buchenwald, from the perspective of a highly intellectual mind. It represents a desperate search for understandiing the horrors of Evil, using philosophy and literature as reasoning tools, as well as psychological justification for survival. It is literature of the "living dead!"

1 comments about Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait.

1. 
   Jerzy Ficowski's decades-long dedication to preserving the memory of Bruno Schulz has become legendary. This book is testament to his labors. It will long be the standard biography.

5 comments about Himmler.

1. As one who reads WWII history as a hobby, I was a bit disappointed in this book. A biography it is not. This book is more of a history of the SS starring Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. After reading this biography, I still do not know what made the man tick.
   
   The introduction itself almost made me stop reading the book as it was a long-winded passage about the inquisition and how it related to the Nazis and Heinrich. Therefore, I skipped the intro and started reading the book.
   
   The first half of the book covered lots of his childhood and early history with the Nazis. The first half elaborated way too much on items I did not think were important...such as a home for women who could become impregnated by the master race, and so on. It just didn't do anything for me.
   
   The only saving grace for this book was the second half. It related entirely to the war and Himmler's involvement with the prison camps, round up and extermination of the Jews. This was riveting reading. And it is only this half of the book that saves it from being a bore.
   
   The book abruptly ends with Himmler's death. However, nothing more is ever said about the post-war lives of his wife, his mistress, and his kids by both. I think this would have added more depth to the book.
   
   Nevertheless, the book is worth one read, but I would not read it again. I didn't find anything more here than I do in other books about the SS.



2. I attempted to read this book several years ago and found it to be utter rubbish!! This book is worthy of the "National Enquirer" as opposed to a serious biography of Heinrich Himmler. Himmler is a subject worthy of a biography for his infamous career but Padfield's work is so full of inaccuracies on so many levels I tossed the book in the trash after the first few chapters it was so bad.
   A better but not nearly as lengthy biography can be found in Heinz Hoehne's "The Order of the Deaths Head." This book however is nonsense.



3. The definitive biography on Himmler. The author describes one of the most terrifying character in history in a text that is at the same time informative and objective. From his youth as a worker in a chicken farm to his death by suicide shortly after his arrest by the British, we see the development of a cold-blooded murderer...well, not so cold-blooded, since he appears to have nearly fainted when he saw for the first and only time the actions of his henchmen from the Einsatzgruppen first hand.
   Himmler's numerous speeches, whether secret or public, form the most chilling reading.
   A brilliant piece of historic literature, this book is indispensable for a clear understanding of how evil can take the improbable look of a bland, bespectacled schoolmaster. Himmler definitely embodies what has been called "the banality of evil".



4. Upfront, I have to admit that I did enjoy this thoroughly researched book. This biography has a lot of information not only on its subject (Himmler) but on Germans, Nazism in power, "the final solution", and the other leading characters of the Nazi regime, as well. Some sentences, indeed, full passages, are rather abstruse. There is a widespread use of speculation by the author regarding Himmler's motivations and actions. Mr. Padfield also engages into detailed psychoanalysis, mainly regarding Himmler, without being clear how qualified he might be on this field. Overall, this book is worth reading if you are truly interested in this historical period.



5. Peter Padfield's bio of Himmler is one of the most thoroughly researched books I've ever read. Padfield turns all his literary siege engines on the enimatic personality of the fourth and most important Reichsfuhrer-SS, attempting to crack the Himmler facade and present the world's most notorious secret policeman in all his human complexity. As much is as possible with such a cypher, he succeeds.
   
   Padfield's book is wide-ranging, covering not merely Himmler but his development of the SS Order from a 290 man bodyguard detail into a quasi-religious empire numbering in the millions. Special emphasis is placed on his relationships with top Nazi leaders, as well as his chief subordinates: Schellenberg, Wolff, Eicke, Kaltenbrunner, and most importantly Reinhard Heydrich. Padfield's aim is not merely to account for Himmler, but for the deeds of his organization. Considering the enormity of his task, he does a pretty impressive job: he's especially skilled at following cause to effect, i.e., of showing how Himmler's bureacratic decisions affected the lives of millions of people, often by ending them. He's unflinching in his depictions of concentration camps, extermination centers, slave camps, and the mass executions of the Einsatgruppen, but more importantly he does an excellent job of putting them in context. They are part, but not all, of the SS mission, and Padfield shows how the many responsibilities of the organization blended together to serve Hitler's wishes as they were percieved by the "Reichsheine."
   
   A good bit of the book is conjecture on Padfield's part -- conjecture as to what was said during certain conversations, conjecture as to what Himmler was thinking or the reasons behind his actions. Padfield deserves strong praise for pain-stakingly pointing out where he is speculating and where he is recounting the facts: a lot of authors can't seem to tell the difference between fact and opinion. On the other hand, Padfield isn't shy about trashing other historians who disagree with his opinions on the evolution of the Holocaust. He usually prefaces their opinions with the words, "Some historiuans, apparently in all seriousness, maintain..."
   
   The book does have weaknesses. Padfield often dismisses out of hand the accounts of certain Nazis when they disagree with his version of events, then unhestitatingly accepts them later on when they jibe. His prose bogs down on more than one occasion: he seems to have a love-affair with run-on sentences that leave the reader (this reader anyway) exhausted and confused. His choice of phrasing is sometimes poor, obscuring the meaning of his passages, and there are a number of small editing mistakes such as incorrect dates or missing letters(probably the publisher's fault and not the author's). More annoying is the strange sloppiness of detail on his description of military events. It's as if his huge effort to research every aspect of Himmler/the SS left him too weary to proof his passages on the war for easily avoidable errors. He writes, for example, that the SS Panzer Corps penetrated the Soviet lines to a depth of 100 miles at Kursk. Uh, no, Peter, it didn't. If it had, the Germans would have won the battle and maybe the war, since the Kursk Salient was only 80-odd miles wide. If this seems like nit-picking, I mention it only because it is far from the only example. In another passage he says the German Ardennes offensive was supported by the fire of 10,000 assault guns. Again, sloppiness: an assault gun is a turretless tank, not an artillery piece, and the Germans certainly did not have anything close to 10,000 guns. A quick check of any coffee-table book on that battle would give the accurate figures, but Padfield didn't bother.
   
   What Padfield left out of Himmler's military career is also interesting. He makes virtually no mention of the "North Wind" offensive launched on Strasbourg in January, 1945, which occurred under Himmler's command. Though he spends much of the latter part of the book discussing the Nazi hope of engineering a split between the various Allies, he makes no mention of how Himmler's attack nearly accomplished this, by creating a violent disagreement between the Americans and the French over whether Strasbourg should be abandoned. Similarly, he leaves out the role of Panzerbrigade 150, the SS unit equipped with American uniforms and equipment, during the Battle of the Bulge. Some of this may simply have been editing decisions, but the ommissions are notable.
   
   Another problem is opinionated psychological theorizing. Padfield does not simply aim to recount Himmler's life and doings and let the reader infer what he may from them; he constantly, and sometimes annoyingly, tries to probe Himmler's psyche, and the psyche of all the top Nazis. This is tempting and to be expected on some level -- obviously we want to understand Himmler's motivations -- but any psychological profile is speculation and inference (the so called SWAG or scientific wild-ass guess), and Pafield plays amateur psychological detective to a tiresome degree.
   
   A final complaint: the abrupt ending of the book. "Himmler" has no afterword; it stops literally at the moment of his death, and I never did find out what happened to Himmler's wife, his mistress, or his children by both.
   
   Having made these criticisms, I have to say that "Himmler" is still a very significant book. I was fascinated by the bold and often contraversial take Padfield had on major events, by his willingness to attack commonly accpeted versions of events (such as the supposedly poor relationship between Bormann and Himmler)
   by his exhaustive research on every aspect of the SS and by his insightful thoughts on Himmler's relationship to Hitler. I did not find "Himmler" an easy read, but it is an important one.