3 comments about A Boring Evening At Home.

1. After reading Gerda Weissmann Klein's classic All But My Life, I couldn't wait to dig into A Boring Evening at Home. It came as no surprise that this collection of stories is equally as moving and inspiring, and each memory uniquely shares Klein's reflections and thoughts on her life post-Holocaust. In this uplifting work, Klein's words bring appreciation to even the smallest things in life, whether it be a loaf of bread or a simple evening spent at home with the family.



2. The third book written by Gerda Weissman Klein, A Boring Evening At Home, chronicles her life in America after the Holocaust. Her first book, All But My Life, is the classic story of her survival during World War II. The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath is her own love story with Kurt Klein, a German born American soldier who liberated her from a concentration camp.
   
   This book, a collection of vignettes, delves into the complex and contrasting emotions Klein experiences at different points throughout her life as a result of her Holocaust survival. At times she feels guilt about her survival, yet Klein is gifted with the ability to find beauty and delight in simple daily activities such as buying bread, and celebrating New Years' Eve.
   
   Family weaves her stories together; she speaks of ones lost and also found after the war. She reminisces about her childhood in Poland and the family that did not survive. Klein's relationship with her uncle, her last living relative and a man with a flair for life, makes a particularly amusing narrative.
   
   Despite huge tragedy in her life, Gerda Weissman Klein took hope and inspiration from being able to lead a normal life. It is an uplifting story of life after a dark period in history, and a woman who bore no resentment, but learned to appreciate even A Boring Evening At Home. I recommend this book for everyone; it has a universal message that is uplifting and will make you take an extra moment to appreciate the small joys of everyday life and family.



3. Gerda Klein has the ability to put together stories that pull fromher historic past, yet identify with everyone who reads them. In a collection of very well written stories, Klein reminds readers what the important things in life are: love, family, honesty, loyalty, and friendship. This book can be read and enjouyed by people of all ages.

2 comments about Sala, More Than a Survivor: The Will to Power and the Nature of Dissipative Systems.

1. "Sala" is different from most available survivor stories for two reasons. First, its subject was only ten years old when she was taken away. Most accounts we have deal with older survivors, whereas Sala basically grows up in a concentration camp and is one of the few children that age to survive, adding a new perspective. Secondly, this book doesn't end with her liberation from the Nazis, but chronicles Sala living a full life despite a past that would make many give up. True stories like this are invaluable to our history, and Marsha Cook writes it eloquently.



2. Sometimes it is nice to read the story of someone who has been there. Not fictionalized, not historical, just a person who after reading thier story you know you can relate to. This story is short and simple during an age of incomprehensible legnth and complexity.
   This book is a great buy, especially to share with young adults.

No comments about Escape through the Balkans: The Autobiography of Irene Grunbaum.

5 comments about Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story.

1. James Bond was a fictionalized glorified version of Ian Fleming's war career, but it's openly fictitious and admittedly entertaining (if shallow). This book has the fiction and the shallowness, but it reflects really poorly on Michel Thomas as a person. I've three primary objections:
   (1) his chauvinism: MT always complains that women outside his family betray him, yet he manipulates them for his own purposes with no second thought (the daughter of the camp commandant for example, must have betrayed him because he refused her offer to rescue him a day before all the prisoners were rounded up, even though he was playing her to help his own survival). This rush to judgment that others have the worst-possible motives also shows in his attitudes towards the Poles, where he claims that Poland had the worst anti-Semitism in Europe (even though his own relations in Lodz were very successful), largely because he didn't think he and his mother were treated well (the worst thing that happened was a cruel joke where neighbors acted like he'd fallen down a well), where not long before the author discusses how his mother had done something socially unacceptable in the period by divorcing twice - so is it anti-Semitism or would a Catholic/Lutheran/etc. woman who divorced twice be treated similarly?
   (2) The nonsense about the Gestapo giving up on torturing him after six or seven hours makes a mockery of the many people who had suffered under the regime for much longer.
   (3) The claim of entering a psychological state making him incapable of feeling pain when he's being tortured - if this is really possible (and keep in mind neither the CIA and KGB could replicate a such feat), then it also makes a mockery of all the people throughout history who have suffered. It's simply that they didn't have MT's strength of character and mind to overcome their pain. Furthermore, if he did figure something like this out, he should have been visiting cancer or burn wards and teaching that to people instead of teaching languages to celebrities.
   
   Skip this book - I'm disappointed that anyone would participate a biography that portrays him as a egomaniacal self-righteous misogynist (MT apparently participated in the writing of it). The way that it's written calls into question all the other claims that MT has made about his war record.



2. This book tells an improbable tale which, surprisingly, is entirely true.
   
   The book can be hard to follow chronologically for readers unfamiliar with WWII history, and its style can be a bit hagiographic at times, but the underlying facts of Thomas's life are supported by absolutely solid documentation and statements from Thomas's surviving wartime comrades, who went to bat for him when his bona fides were questioned by an L.A. Times humor columnist after the biography was published.
   
   In 2003, their testimonials were forwarded to the U.S. Army by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic New York City Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, along with original military documentation from the National Archives concerning the specific battles in which Thomas participated. The following year the U.S. Army awarded Thomas the Silver Star for his bravery fighting against the Nazis in 1944. In a moving ceremony, Senators Bob Dole and John Warner pinned the medal on Thomas in the shadow of the Atlantic Wall of the newly-dedicated WWII Memorial in Washington, in May 2004. Thomas's family and friends, and several of his wartime comrades stood by, many with tears in their eyes, along with an honor guard of Army Rangers standing at attention. Because Thomas was also a recognized member of the French Resistance, the Ambassador of France, M. Levitte, also attended the ceremony, and saluted Thomas's wartime heroism.
   
   [...]



3. This book is loaded with factual errors [in my opinion]. It makes claims about the World War II feats of Michel Thomas that are completely at odds with military records, newspaper articles from that era and other reliable sources.
   
   Some examples:
   
   1. Author Christopher Robbins claims Thomas was an officer in the U.S. Army. In fact, Thomas was a civilian employee, and the L.A. Times, which debunked much of this book, has National Archives military documents from 1946 bearing Thomas' signature over the words "civilian assistant."
   
   2. In the book, Thomas said he was born in Poland. However, for 38 years, he told journalists he was born in France -- and different parts of France at that.
   
   3. Robbins claims Thomas was with the first battalion of U.S. troops as it entered the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. After the L.A. Times proved otherwise, Thomas tried to backtrack, claiming he never said he was with the battalion, only that he arrived at Dachau sometime the first day. There are two problems with this explanation. First, the introduction to "Test of Courage" states that Thomas verified every fact in the book. Second, Thomas had been claiming he was with the first troops in newspaper articles dating back to the 1950s.
   
   4. The book says Thomas single-handedly discovered and rescued millions of Nazi Party ID cards from destruction at a paper mill near Munich in May 1945. But this version of events is flatly contradicted by October 1945 articles in the New York Times and London Express.
   
   5. Robbins also claims Thomas escaped Gestapo butcher Klaus Barbie. But in 1983, the U.S. Justice Department's chief Nazi hunter called a press conference to denounce Thomas' Klaus Barbie stories. And when Thomas testified at Barbie's 1987 trial, the prosecutor asked the jury to disregard Thomas' testimony, saying it wasn't made in good faith.
   
   Although the book purports to be thoroughly documented, the "evidence" [in my opinion] in it didn't hold up, as several media reports have demonstrated.



4. Being an avid fan of Michel's language teaching methods I was very very disappointed in "The Michel Thomas Story". Whilst Michel's early life and times made very sad reading, I felt that Christopher Robbins book, whilst good in many respects, did not really give an insight into Michel's personality or post-war life. It focused almost entirely on World War 2 and the problems that it bequeathed to Michel.
   
   For instance, Michel leaves Europe after WW2 and pops up in the USA but there is scant mention on how he made a living sufficient to finance and start up his language schools and the book practically ignores his contacts with many well-known people in Hollywood etc. His personal life must have had many more interesting threads than the writer of this biography has chosen to develop.
   
   If Michel himself were to write a biography I am sure that I would then feel that I knew the man behind the name and there is clearly much more of interest to develop in another book.
   
   Every success to Michel - his language teaching methods are simply magic and certainly work, even on me, a non-linguist!



5. Recently, John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, made some comments about this book at a symposion at UC Berkeley that in a nutshell give you all the reasons you need not to read this book. He stated:

   "We published a story awhile back, by a very clever reporter named Roy Rivenburg, about a man who published his autobiography. And, if you read the autobiography, you'd be amazed you'd never heard of this man, because he pretty much single-handed won World War II for us. It was a preposterous book, and our review of it was an investigative review. It debunked many of the claims in this book and had some fun doing it, had a few laughs at the author's expense. When you put yourself out in public and make claims that are preposterous, and publish a book on it, you're likely to get a reviewer who will look into that and set the record straight. I'm very proud of that story, we haven't retracted a word of it, we don't intend to because it was true."

   This book is actually a biography (not autobiography) of Michel Thomas by a British writer named Christopoher Robbins. The book is well-written and reads like a thriller, but thanks to some fine investigative reporting by the LA Times we now know that many of the "heroic" exploits of Thomas' life may be more fiction than fact.

No comments about Live! Remember! Tell the World!: The Story of a Hidden Child Survivor of Transnistria (Artscroll History).

No comments about Renewal of Life: Healing from the Holocaust.

No comments about My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900-1944.

3 comments about Milena: The Tragic Story of Kafka's Great Love.

1. Since the hardback edition of the new translation of Milena was published last year, Margarete Buber-Neumann, friend to the mistress of Kafka for four years at Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, has died. She died old enough to see the collapse of the Stalinist system that imprisoned her in Siberia, old enough to feel the great hopes that the socialism she fought for will now at last sweep through Europe.
   
   Milena Jesenska fought for the cause too, in her writing and through her actions, leading to her arrest and incarceration at Ravensbruck. She initially sought out Greta Buber to hear the truth about Stalin; what developed was a deep and passionate love. Though Buber-Neumann is no great stylist indeed the book at times fails to come alive because of her reverence for Milena this is a profoundly moving memoir, part biography, part autobiography and part love story, even if, as the subject predicted, told by an 'indulgent judge.' For Milena, on her deathbed, commissioned Buber-Neumann to write this book as a document of life in the camps. However, the camp is but the terrifying context for a tale about a beautiful girl who turned the eyes of the Prague Circle in the Twenties with her boyish looks and who began a painful love affair with Franz Kafka and of how she outlived him and of how 'the living fire' as Kafka described her was quenched.



2. Milena Jesenka is most known to the world through her connection to and correspondance with Kafka. Her friend Margerete Buber- Neumann tells her story with great insight and feeling. She tells especially of Milena, who imprisoned at Ravensbruck was a heroic helper of others there. This story inspires and saddens deeply because it shows the tragic and painful end of a truly noble and courageous human being.



3. This is a biography of Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist who was, in a way, a great love of Kafka's. She was an unusual woman for her time. Highly intelligent and with a rebellious streak, she fashioned herself into a journalist and became well-regarded for her literary and political writing. In her 20s she came to know Kafka when she translated his work into Czech. This gave rise to an impassioned correspondence between them, although the connection didn't turn into a real-life love affair, partly because Milena was married, and partly because of Kafka's numerous anxieties and aversions in the male/female domain. Unfortunately, those interested in insights into Kafka will not get many from this book, as he comes and goes quite quickly in the narrative. Rather, the book is a loving tribute to Milena by Margarete Buber-Neumann, with whom she was imprisoned at the women's concentration camp at Ravensbrück. The two had planned to write a book together when they were freed, but Milena died of kidney failure in May 1944, so Margarete chose instead to tell her friend's story.

4 comments about First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy.

1. Rosetta Loy's memoir of life in Italy during WWII, FIRST WORDS, traces a little girl's awakening to the meaning of blind hate by the fascists.
   
   A Catholic nation, Italy should have followed Christ and turned against the hate-filled fascist state. However, Pope Pius XII offered no Christian model to emulate. Instead, this quasi-holy, German-sympathizer avoided confrontation, closed his eyes to atrocities and was still recommended for sainthood after the holocaust.
   
   Rosetta Loy watched as Jewish friends disappeared. Afterwards, she researched how Italy reacted to the obvious carnage. After her research, she points an angry finger directly at the Pope and his minions.
   
   This book is a warning to Bush-Cheney and other fascists in the USA today. Your unprovoked wars, your stereo-typing of Mexicans as illegals so as to camouflage your wars in Iraq and your neo-con pugnacious attitude around the world are doomed.
   
   Even Karl Rove re-writing history won't save your souls after your hate-filled, arrogant, bigotted, fascistic acts.
   
   Even a child can see the fascists underneath your fake smiles.



2. Rosetta Loy opens this book with her first memories of childhood as a young girl in Rome in the early 30s. She then paints the picture from that time to 1943.

   This book actually tells two stories - first the account of Rosetta's life during that period of time and second the historical facts of the time.
   The entire book impressed me, but two things about this book absolutely AMAZED me.

   1. Roessetta Loy's voice. On the first page she is a young girl tended by a nanny, the reader is treated with the perspective of life at this point in time from the unusual view of a curious and intelligent child. As the book progresses and Rossetta ages the story changes in vocabulary and scope.
   2. Ms. Loy presents the key points of political and legal changes in her church, city and country with simply clarity. This is the first book that I have read on the subject that didn't attempt go overboard on explanations, excuses or "what ifs". Ms. Loy states the facts of legal changes and racial politics of Italy at the time without attempting to question `how', `why', `to what end' and `what if'. Instead the reader will hear these questions echo in their own mind.

   This is a powerful book. It is written in simple style and easy to read. It could be read in a day or two, but if you are like me when you get to the end you will want to read it again.




3. I could not disagree more with the previous "book critic". This book is not a lambasting of individual Catholics or of the many individual priests that helped to save many Jews. One need only look at Ms. Loy's characterization of Pope Pius XI and his very anti-semetic stance to see that this book in no way sees all Catholics as heartless beasts. What it does show is that with the on-slot of Pope Pius XII's reign, the organized Catholic body-politic did nothing privately or publicly to condemn the atrocities committed against Jews at home or abroad in Nazi Germany. There were over 1200 Jews in Rome alone that could have been "hidden" in the Vatican...but no, the response to that was that Pope Pius XII could have been arrested. Getting arrested seems very tame to Jesus being crucified, does it not? All I can say is that, along with the reading of this very touching book by Ms. Loy, I would also recommend everyone out there supplimenting the reading of this book with Mr. Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope".



4. The media seems to be eating up every book that blasts the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII...here's another attempt to cover up the heroics of the Church during the Nazi era....

5 comments about On Burning Ground: A Son's Memoir.

1. This was a nice story, but it was clouded by some very philosphical rantings by the son both early in the book and at the end. Also troubling was the son's writing of his father's story. He talkes about his father, then his grandfather and grandmother, and it is difficult to follow, especially early in the story. I wish he would have written it as his father's narrative as told to him.
   
   This is a very harrowing account on how one person survived the Holocaust. Skakun was blessed with blue eyes and blond hair, and it was fairly easy to pass himself off as an Aryan, with the exception of his circumcision. Both passing into Germany and his physical for the Waffen SS necesitated him taking a physical in the nude. I think his heightened awareness of how vulnerable he was resulted in a certain nervousness, which could have resulted in his uncovered secret identity.
   
   This is a nice easy read about a very lucky Polish Jew. His unconventional route and his luck led to him surviving the war. Skakun credits the good deeds of his mother in his survival of the war.



2. No one can doubt how much Michael Skakun loves his father and how proud he is of his fathers amazing story of survival. However. I would have toned down the flowery writing, after all, in a biography there really no way of knowing all the expressions of the faces in the room, the smells, the sounds, etc. I also would have included a postscript on whether the subject of the book is still alive, where he lives, or where he spent his last days. Too many loose ends for me, but a book that is very good and worth reading.



3. I have always had a deep interest in the Holocaust, I think it is because of the fact that it occured so recent in our history, it is so incredible that in our modern society, a country such as Germany was so willing to carry out such a morbid and shockingly sinister plan of brutality and murder. That ordinary citizens could be so callous and treacherous,...I am amazed!

   Joseph Skakun, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, takes us on a journey into his mind numbing past. Divine intervention, solid logic and humblness, play a major role in his reason for survival.

   Personally I think this story is very unique and wouldn't be surprised to see it become a movie.




4. Skakun's experiences are comparable to those of Yehuda Nir in "The Lost Childhood" and Moshe Perlman in "Europa, Europa". The crowning irony is Skakun's (almost) joining the Waffen SS in order to hide his Jewish identity, and to survive. However, there are just a few errors of background historical fact which mar "On Burning Ground". E.g., on page 203 Julius Streicher is named as the founder of the Nazi paper "Volkische Beobachter". This is wrong. Streicher founded "Der Sturmer". Volkische Beobachter was an outgrowth of "Munchener Beobachter", a paper purchased and re-founded by Dietrich Eckart. This is the sort of mistake that better editing might have caught. But "On Burning Ground" still stands as a riveting account of survival through quick thinking and a lot of luck.



5. What can I add to the above? Not much. I rarely read Holocaust memoirs, but this one was amazing. Michael's father, Joseph, a Talmudic scholar with blue eyes and blond hair, who tried to save his mother in Navaredok/Novogrudek Poland, failed, and fled to the forests and to Vilna. As a circumcised male in Vilna, Joseph took on the identity of a Muslim Tatar, studied Islam, and became a foreign laborer in Berlin. A hidden Jew pretending to be a Muslim living in the Nazi capital during the War. And then he enlisted in the SS!