3 comments about No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn.

1. The author recounts her experiences in a form of interviews given in the 1990's, some fifty years after the events. She also expresses anger over those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and lists some of her loved ones who perished in this tragedy that supposedly never happened.
   
   Alina Bacall-Zwirn understands the fact that much of the so-called Polish police, in the service of the Germans, actually consisted of ethnic Germans. She comments: "That was the Volksdeutsche, working for Gestapo. That was the Polish police." (p. 40).
   
   She lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and was shipped to Treblinka. She managed to jump from the train, and was aided by a Pole who brought her food (p. 35). She then made it back to Warsaw.
   
   Later, she met with Poles who were being shipped to Germany for forced labor, and Poles who were incarcerated in concentration camps as a result of the failed Warsaw Uprising.



2. This was a difficult book for me to read. It is in the first person style. I can hear their voices. I did an interview three years ago. It is on tape. Yet i can not listen to it.. Such a difficult time in our youth, in our lives. I recommend this book. This one voice speaks for so many.



3. it made quite an impact on me. emotionally draining. how Alina kept her sanity is remarkable. Stark did not try to editorialize. instead as painful as it was, he let her tell it in her own way, regardless of syntax. i have never read anything like it...in only three hours i experienced an unforgettable voice.

1 comments about Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book).

1. I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

   Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
   grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
   Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

   This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
   from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
   For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
   Buchenwald).

   Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

1 comments about Escape: Against All Odds A Survivor's Story.

1. There are many stories of the holocaust. Just when you think you've heard them all, this one stands out as an incredible and unique story. Mr. Lubow tells his story in first-person and a casual style that makes you feel as if you are sitting in a room with him and being riveted to the descriptions of unimaginable ordeal he endured as a young man, from having his town sealed off to losing some of his family members and having to hide for months during the brutal winter with the rest of his family and several others in a tiny room beneath a farmer's pig sty. And that is just the beginning. Lubow's story is another powerful reminder of the atrocities of the holocaust. It is a great book and would make a tremendous movie.

No comments about Memories of a Holocaust Survivor - Irving Farber.

No comments about From Milano to New York By Way of Hell: Fascism and the Odyssey of a Young Italian Jew.

2 comments about What Time And Sadness Spared: Mother And Son Confront the Holocaust.

1. The main character in this moving book is a teenaged girl, Roma, who is separated from her affluent family and sent to a concentration camp at the age of 16, where she never knows if she will be in the next group of inmates selected to die in the crematorium. Her only solace from the daily horrors is the imagined conversations she has at night, before going to sleep, with her mother. The story of how she manages to survive with her humanity intact and start a new life in Israel makes for gripping reading; I read this book in one sitting. Especially interesting is the epilogue, where she talks about what it felt like to return to Poland nearly 60 years after she left. Adding to the authenticity of the historical details is the fact that Roma's co-author, her son, is a history professor. He writes about the difficulties faced by himself and his mother in writing about her past. Rather than just telling a story, this book addresses the problem of reconciling memory with historical fact, and what it means to write about your past so many years later.



2. This is the greatest and most touching memoir on the Holocaust I have ever read. It provides psychological insights into the way the victims felt. Read this!!!!!

No comments about The Audacity To Live.

1 comments about My Life of Turmoil.

1. My Life of Turmoil: A Jewish Immigrant's Story and Warning is the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Larry Wenig, whose trials did not end with the close of World War II - he endured hardships at the hands of the Soviet Communists in a Siberian gulag, and survived living in a Uzbekistan mud hut followed by an Austrian Displaced Persons camp, arriving in the United states at age 22, weak, nearly penniless, and knowing no English. His determination to rise above the odds, and his willingness to put in long hours of work while studying at night school led him to achieve his dream of becoming a lawyer. My Life of Turmoil blends resolute determination with the wonder of falling in love and marrying an exceptional woman - yet beyond the biographical narrative is a deeper purpose. Wenig writes to warn readers about the global threat of anti-Semitism and Islamofascism, from the perspective of one who has witnessed hatred, intolerance, and genocide carried to their most horrifying extremes. Highly recommended reading.

3 comments about The Parnas: A Scene from the Holocaust.

1. Insightful,analytical and comprehensive portrait of a loving character.Is a masterpiece. Full of drama,but it was a real life drama.The "parnas" was a sensitive man struggling with his own imaginative fears but valiantly facing the real fear.



2. Pisa, Italy. July, 1944. As the Nazis and Allies collide, Giuseppe Pardo Roques, lay leader of Pisa's Jewish community, is a refugee in his own home. Struggling to display strength in spite of a bizarre and debilitating neurosis, the cultured, learned and generous Pardo plays host to several others, Jews and Christians both, seeking shelter from the battle. The Parnas reconstructs Pardo's final days and his ultimate confrontation with the Nazis. At once memoir (the author knew the characters), psychological profile, and meditation on good and evil, the book's defining quality is compassion. I'll read it again.



3. This is an incredible story.

   Silvano Arieti was an extremely gifted, and very well known, psychiatrist. He was born in Pisa, Italy and, as a child, looked to The Parnas--or synagogue leader, Giuseppe Pardo Roques--as a mentor. The Parnas was mentally ill. His illness inspired Arieti's career--which, as it developed, convinced Arieti all the more that "mental illness may...espress the nobility of man."

   Arieti dreamed he would one day cure The Parnas, but The Parnas was murdered by the Nazis in WWII. Decades later, Arieti recreates the last days of The Parnas, providing us with a moving potrait of an incredible man in terrible times.

   While Arieti's conclusions are profound, this book is definately accessible to the high school reader.

1 comments about Milly's Story: A Young Girl's Memories Of The Second World War, Luxembourg 1940-1945.

1. This book should be read by all those interested in Luxembourg genealogy, and especially by all those whose Dad fought in the European Theater of WWII. The story of the Americans who billeted with Milly's family is absolutely priceless. I was also thoroughly enchanted by the glimpses of life in an occupied country. Much of what I read explained my research either into Luxembourg genealogy or WWII in general. (Do YOU know why Beethoven's Fifth was a codeword? I do now!! Reminds me of an old Basil Rathbone movie...). Enjoy this easy read--such fun shouldn't be missed!