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!

5 comments about Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist.

1. Until Myriam Anissimov published this comprehensive biography of Primo Levi in 1998, the world knew him primarily through his own writings. He was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Turin, Italy, in 1919. His people were not observant Jews, and Levi, apparently, knew little about "Jewishness" until Mussolini's anti-Semitic policy taught him something about his heritage. His father, Casare, was an electrical engineer and an avid reader. Primo learned from him that the humanities and the sciences need not be separate worlds.
   
   Trained as a chemist, he was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to the Monowitz concentration camp, part of the Auschwitz complex in 1944. Badly beaten and half-starved, Levi was determined to spend his time mentally recording his irrational world "with the curiosity of the naturalist." His background in chemistry actually saved his life, Levi was to acknowledge later. After being transferred to work in the camp laboratory his situation improved dramatically. Anissimov's account of the final days at Auschwitz - when Levi, suffering from scarlet fever, managed to forage, with a few comrades, through a semi-dismantled concentration camp in the freezing cold - is the focal point of her book. Her research is meticulous. Levi survived 11 months as slave laborer 174517 until the liberation of what he called "that hideous distortion of humanity." Seven months after the war, he was still a refugee in Russia, trying to make his way home.
   
   When he returned to Turin, to the same apartment where he had always lived, he felt a terrible need to bear witness. He had watched as fellow inmates were stripped of their essential selves before they died in the flesh. His powerful memoirs, works of fiction and poetry describe his experience in the death camp and his later travels in Eastern Europe. Levi wrote. "And I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune." The civilized world did not seem to care what he had to say, however. No large publisher would accept his powerful manuscript, "Survival in Auschwitz." Anissimov reports that the book received a few positive reviews but was "distributed rather than sold."
   
   For the last forty years of his life Levi devoted himself to understanding why he was not killed in the concentration camp. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. He spent much of his time writing about literature, astronomy, philosophy, the wonders of the natural life and the dignity of manual labor. Married with two children, he was a lifelong agnostic, and was described by some coreligionists as a stranger to Jewish culture. He worked at his profession, as a research chemist and factory manager, until his retirement. Plagued by survivor's guilt, and inner wounds, as well as the coverage the media was giving to Holocaust deniers, Levi, the most gentle of men, died in Turin in April 1987, an apparent suicide.
   
   This biography delves deeply into the life and mind of the man who was a philosophical student of life. Ms. Anissimov, a French journalist and novelist, explores the complex nature of the man, who was at once such a vital force, a real survivor in many senses, and the man prone to dark moods, disillusionment and bouts of severe depression. She writes, with riveting detail, about Levi's year in Auschwitz, drawing on his autobiographical accounts and those of other survivors. Hers was the supremely difficult task of attempting to do what Levi himself said he could not. He was not able to show how the survivor and the scientist, separately and together, perceived the world. "Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist" is based primarily on Ms. Anissimov's reading of Levi's work, her correspondence or interviews with men and women associated with him, and interviews and essays on him by others. This painstaking journalistic endeavor is concise and clear, which is what Mr. Levi believed his own work should be - "avoiding embellishments and convolutions." She has accomplished all this and more. I have read that many are disappointed that this biography did not delve more into Levi's personality, his psyche. I understand that his wife would not be interviewed. Nor would she release intimate personal papers. When close family members do not cooperate, and first-hand information is not available, it is almost impossible to form an accurate analysis of someone's inner complexities.
   
   I was deeply moved by this biography. There are flaws here, but overall it presents an extraordinary portrait of a great man. His writings were fundamental in shaping many people's understanding of what the Holocaust meant when he originally wrote about it, and what it means today, in the context of the 21st century. Some people, devastated by the manner in which he died, say that the Holocaust finally killed him. I do not believe this. Primo Levi fought almost all his life to live. He struggled to enjoy life and the world around him, and to bear witness, an enormous responsibility for anyone. He fought courageously for forty plus years. I respect him greatly for that, and for allowing us all to know him a little bit.
   JANA



2. Primo Levi: Tragedy Of An Optimist is a major biography which delves deeply into the life, mind and work of an influential writer, philosopher, and Holocaust witness. Drawing from exhaustive research, interviews with friends and relatives, as well as numerous unpublished texts and testimonies, biographer Myriam Anissimov explores the complex nature of a most singular, shy, intelligent, and diffident man who was both a strong-spirited survivor and a sufferer of depression, a man who felt misunderstood, certain that future generations would inevitably forget, and even deny, that the Holocaust happened. Indeed, on April 11, 1987, his self-deprecating depression was to lead him to suicide by throwing himself down the staircase of the building in which he was born. Primo Levi is a superbly presented biography and an important, singular contribution to Holocaust studies.



3. As many reviewers have noted, this English translation whittles down the original French two-volume work, so perhaps an English-language reader's perspective is likewise narrowed; perhaps the publisher and translator of the English version are also responsible for the admittedly scattershot coverage given by Anissimov to Primo Levi's inner complexity. Again, Levi was certainly not the most forthcoming of men, even as he was a writer most famous for his autobiographical accounts. His wife and children receive little more than fleeting mention in the hundreds of closely-printed pages, and inevitably her treatment serves sometimes more as a commentary on the works of Levi himself than a fresh work. How difficult it must be, after all, to write the biography of an autobiographer! Yet, having pointed out some faults, this biography is worthwhile for its picture of the Piedmontese Jewish community into which Levi was born and returned to; its explanations of how Fascist Italy differed from Nazi Germany in its anti-Semitic actions; and most of all how the inner workings of the lager--Auschwitz-Birkenau--played out in Levi's classic accounts as well as the larger context of the privations endured by many of his fellow inmates. Here, the two lengthy chapters on the camp are astoundingly detailed and intimately rendered, and would make an ideal follow-up to readers who have read Levi's own descriptions, for Anissimov is alert to what Levi says and what he leaves out. Apparently the child of refugees herself, the sensitivity and acumen with which Anissimov describes how and why Levi gave the famous accounts for which he is justly famed makes her biography--especially in these two long chapters which themselves comprise almost a monograph--necessary for those who have first read Levi's own works. Her book will not tell you much new about the content of these works, but you will understand better why they were written when in his career, and why such a reticent man remained so in his own life while his books spoke for--only some part--of the pain and hope he carried within and guarded carefully.



4. I bought this book with great expecations--partly on the strength of Victor Brombert's NYT review and partly because I was midway through the wonderful Periodic Table when the biography came out. My hopes were disappointed--big time. The problem is, the writer has collected a lot of details, only to be confronted with the necessity of doing something with the details. She was not up to the task. In many cases, information is put forth without any attempt to integrate it into Levi's life story. The reader asks, What does this have to do with Levi? How did it have an impact? How should we interpret the information--should we interpret it at all? Alas, one senses that the author dug up some fact or other and said, well, now I'm going to cram it into my book. You figure it out, reader. Another problem with the author's treatment of detail is her very annoying repetition of facts. Sometimes the language is close to verbatim in different places throughout the book. Levi's books are constantly being published and then, a few pages later, published again (and I'm not talking about different translations). A third problem is that much of the information seems to have been gleaned from Levi's published books. And yet there are no new interpretive glosses that add anything to what Levi himself wrote. Finally, as the Amazon review notes, Levi the man does not emerge from the pages. If you want to know about Levi, stick with Survival in Auschwitz, the Periodic Table, and his other works. Wait for a better biography than this one.



5. Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, apparently committed suicide in 1987, after writing several books about his life and his experiences at Auschwitz. Why would Levi, who was like the Italian Elie Wiesel, commit suicide after a life of bearing witness and surviving a death camp? Did he feel survivor's guilt? Did he feel that only the good died, and the bad were allowed to survive? This major biography by Anissimov, the French journalist, delves deeply into the life and mind of the controversial Levi. Why did he feel guilt? Why did he feel misunderstood? Did people die and suffer for nothing? Did he continue to suffer in Turin after the war by caring for his blind and senile mother and mother-in-law? Was he right in thinking that the Holocaust will become just a forgotten footnote in history? This book begins to answer some of these questions, and paints the first of many portraits of the post-Holocaust philosopher.

4 comments about Voices From the Forest: The Story of Abram and Julia Bobrow.

1. As a mother of two young children, I rarely get too involved in a book. But this one I couldn't put down. The story alone is compelling enough, but unlike other biographies, this one reads as well as any novel. This is a story of survival that is a must read.



2. I couldn't put the book down. Extremely well written and simply a chilling story. I hope it is adapted for the bigscreen.



3. A truly moving and inspirational story, combined with a plot that does not let you stop reading makes this novel a must have for everyone. As a story about such a tragic event in human history, this book explores an often ignored aspect of the Holocaust by putting a human face to history.



4. This is a fantastic novel, I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

5 comments about The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis.

1. It would seem that the world has been held hostage thinking one group or another deserves more because they have suffered more than anyone else. Our history books have misinformed us and downright lied about the experiences of so many people as if they did not exist. When we speak of genocide the first thing ringing in our ears is the Holacaust in Germany and what happened to 6 million Jews. What about the 20 million Armenians on April 24,1919 (or thereabouts). What about 9 million Africans drowned in the Middle Passage. How about the annihilation and almost termination of the indigineous people of the Americas. The importance of this book lies in taking a factual, first person, look at the other resident citizens of Germany who were also issued a death penalty under Nazi rule. Hopefully knowing the world wide experience of Genocide (still going on), we as people of the world can stop it.



2. I thought this was an amazing book. It talks about all the others out there who were affected by Hitler, showing it was not only the Jews who were affected and killed, but many others, like the homosexuals, gypsies, ect. The book offers many different opinions and people, and I thought it was an amazing and saddening book.



3. Pity this book is out of print, for it is worth remembering that many millions of non Jews were enslaved and persecuted by the Nazis, the majority of whom were (as recently scholarship confirms) Ukrainians.



4. The Other Victims was a book of real life stories from the Holocaust. I liked this book because it tells how people had to go into hiding, how they had no freedom, and how they fought back. The book is mainly about people trying to escape from Germany to America or a safe country. My favorite chapter was Bubili: a young Gypsy's fight for survival. Once I started to read this book I couldn't put it down. The reason I couldn't put this book down was it was all true. I thought it was hard to believe it actually happened. The people were killed because of their religion, color, looks, and trying to stop the wrong that was going on.



5. I really liked how this book showed the persecution of all people not only the Jews. In almost all other books I've read about WW2 they talk about the persecution of the Jews. This book made the Holocaust more real to me. It gave me a better perception of what the Nazis were really doing and to some extent why. I think we need to recognize the other groups that suffered also. To me this book is a monument to their suffering.

1 comments about Promises to Keep.

1. The best written account of life during the Holocaust and in the death camps that I have ever read. Tells his story in great detail and many times I felt as though I was expriencing the horrors with Ernest and his friends. This book ranks right up there with Night by Elie Weisel. Ernest Michel is a role model that everyone can learn from. We are very lucky that he was able to escape and tell his story.

No comments about Life Beyond the Holocaust: Memories and Realities.

1 comments about Searching Survivor and the answer I found.

1. This lady went through something so traumatic and then to come out the other end and find Christianity, as a Jewish person, is about as unique as it comes...

2 comments about The Dawn of Hope : A Memoir of Ravensbruck.

1. This thin little book contains some of the memories of Genevieve de Gaulle Anthonioz (niece of Charles de Gaulle), from the time she was imprisoned in Fresnes Prisons during World War II. A young Catholic, she was jailed because of her efforts as a resistance worker.

   She watches a co-worker being beaten to death for trying to wash out her underwear. One of her jobs is to sort through huge piles of dirty, bloody prison uniforms from those who are murdered, to find scraps and buttons that can be reused. Her single cell is flooded with smoke from the ovens. She spends much time in solitude, reflecting on how she will handle her own early death which she is sure is imminent.

   She is never marked for extinction, and so has a slightly different view of life in the camps than the tellers of most books I've read. Life in one of the worst prisons in France during WWII is not pleasant, although through she can receive mail, smuggled in Christmas presents, and medical care when sick.

   In her isolation, she survives by befriending the cockroaches in her cell. She secretly makes a Christmas handkerchief for the Jehovah's Witness who brings meals around. She observes the lives of those destined to die, and is deeply moved.

   Realizing that the only way to bear witness is to survive, she does. It took 55 years for her to be able to write her story - she spent those years raising her children and working to improve the lives of the homeless.

   Translated from the original French, the tenses used are a little unsettling, without any obvious reason. The text switches from past to present sometimes within the same paragraph. It could have used more editing after the translation.

   However, for those interested in the Holocaust, this is a very quick read, and offers a look from the eyes of a young non-Jewish girl. A worthwhile read.




2. A most moving book. You learn of the terrible sufferings experienced in a concentration camp, and the later fruits they would bear.

1 comments about Nine Suitcases: A Memoir.

1. Written almost immediately following the end of WWII, there was no distance between M. Zsolt and his experiences.
   
   Originally published as articles in a magazine, the force of the writing really slams into the reader from the beginning. M. Zsolt picks up his story in 1944 in the Nagyvarad ghetto. At that time, he had already been a slave ('forced labourer') for the Hugarian forces allied with the Nazis in the Ukraine, survived, freed, and then thrown into prison as a political prisoner. He is already in his late 40s, and a veteran of WWI.
   
   What struck me in this memoir is the similarity of M. Zsolt's thinking about the horrors he endures and the writings of M. Wiesel. Both authors come to the conclusion that there are no words to communicate the experience, yet both realize they must attempt to do so.
   
   I'm thankful that this memoir is now available in English (and the translator was actually with M. Zsolt in Bergen-Belsen as a boy).

5 comments about Magda's Daughter: A Hidden Child's Journey Home (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series).

1. What I like best about this book is its straightforwardness. It is not mushy nor is it unnecessarily upsetting. Rather it is an honest and clear-eyed account of a wonderful woman, her colorful family, and their harrowing experiences during and after WWII.
   My 14-year-old daughter read it also and talked about it for weeks. Ms. Blaikie is her new hero. And she is one of my heroes too.



2. Evi Blakie is one of a "new" group of Holocaust survivors - the hidden children who spent their earliest and most formative years living false identities. These children began their lives when the war was over, trying to forge a new and genuine identity, trying to just to "normal" after spending their entire lives thinking war was normal. Like more recent children of war (in Rwanda, Bosnia, etc.) they must spend their entire lives trying to figure out who they are. But what makes this book so wonderful is that it not only tells a story not previously told, and not even that it is a more universal story than we would like to believe - but that she writes well - with strong language and vivid imagery that holds the reader spellbound throughout the telling - and breathless at the end.



3. I am a New Yorker who reads on the subway commuting to the office. On two occasions I missed my stop because I was so engrossed in "Magda's Daughter".

   This book is a tale of human adaptation and resilence. When I finished the book I was in great admiration of Ms. Blaikie. She is a woman of strength and insight.

   It certainly made an impression on how lucky I was to be born in the US after the war and reminded me of the immense suffering caused by the Nazis and the horrendous consequences of the Holocaust.

   Thanks for such a good read. It was a pleasure to get to know Ms. Blaikie.




4. The perspective of a Jewish child growing up in the sureal world of German occupied Hungary tears at your heart. An amazing adventure of survival. Surprising, very good



5. I could not put it down! It is funny and sad, the life's ironies are well described. This is more than a holocoust story. Anybody, who is interested in the effect of war on children should read it. This is a feminist book in the best meaning of the word feminist. A woman's strugle for identity, which is well decribed here, is one of the most important goal of the feminist literature.

   We are living in a time, when children are victims of wars. We should think about them and their future.