1 comments about Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust, The Harry I. Dunai Story.

1. I'm sorry, but this book just was not what I expected it to be. Though Harry Dunai did experience the Holocaust as a Jew, his deafness barely entered into it, except to maybe save his life. His typical experience of being sent away to residential schooling in Budapest probably saved his life, since his parents and brothers were collected and sent to the gas chambers.

   Dunai's life was not easy by any measure, but he had many protectors and many people who cared for him and did so much for him in the way of providing homes and jobs. I don't know if it is the translating of Dunai's own words through his daughter and ghostwriter, but Dunai comes across as a very self-centered human being, who often does not show either the gratefulness for his blessings and for those who do things for him, nor does he express much concern for others.

   Since I've read so many histories and biographies about those who did care on all sides, this one was very disappointing. The section on the war is short...mainly about how hungry he was. A lot of people starved to death...a lot of other people never had the people caring for them nor the opportunities for escaping a horrific existence that Dunai had.

   If you are looking for a good book on the Medical Holocaust as it affected the Deaf, read 'Crying Hands' about the Deaf in Germany who were targeted before and during WWII. This book is okay as a demonstration of deaf life during the war and afterwards in Europe, I guess. (...)

No comments about And Life Is Changed Forever: Holocaust Childhoods Remembered (Landscapes of Childhood).

2 comments about One Step Ahead: A Jewish Fugitive in Hitler's Europe.

1. This is an incredible memoir. The events the author went through when he was basically still a kid had to have been terrifying. Yet he tells his story in a very straightforward, understated way that only someone of his generation could do. He doesn't really go into the emotional toll his years of hiding, running and fear had to have taken on him. He just tells his story - and it's riveting. I'm glad he had the courage to write this down. What a wonderful way to honor his mother and 3 beautiful sisters.



2. I came across this escape memoir in researching my own family's escape from Antwerp during the invasion of May 1940. This is a well written, meticulous and gripping account of a 5 year odyssey through France and Italy during the war, including an account of pre-war life in Germany and Belgium. In addition to the usual depressing experiences, the writer recounts the numerous, often poor, rural (Christian) families he encountered who were incredibly helpful and generous, as well as Italian priests who aided the refugees and funneled desparately needed funds during the prolonged hiding. The author adds to his vivid, detailed first hand accounts some admirable fact and date checking, as well as references, often missing from such memoirs. A wonderful and well done book, deserving of more comment and sales than it has apparently achieved.

1 comments about Diario de Ana Frank.

1. Excellent book. I teach mostly Hispanic students. We read the English and Spanish version simultaneously. It really helped them understand. I always tell them it only takes one person to change the world, even a little 14 year old German girl. Now they understand.Well written, clearly translated.

1 comments about Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust.

1. I had to read this book for a class, I am a senior at college. I attend school around the PIttsburgh area, so I am proud to know that this is from here. There is a story Robert Mendler who is a great speaker. he spoke to my class a few weeks ago. It is good to know that the stories are being written down so generations to come will know what happened and how people survived.

5 comments about Otto, the Boy at the Window: Peter Otto Abele's True Story of Escape from the Holocaust and New Life in America.

1. One of the books you find difficult to put down until you finished the entire book. A story of a small boy looking out of a window at a world of the holocaust with all its horror and who is able to escape, survive and prosper in this land despite a difficult family relationship except for his love for his brother. The story of how he became a successful business man and a loving, caring family man despite his relationship with his parents should be reading material for all young people.



2. A soulful personal account of the Holocaust, loss of freedom and property, and relocation to America by a true survivor. Initiated through his child-eyed visions of Nazi dominance in his Austrian homeland, Mr. Abeles' brings us full circle to his tremendous success and triumph as an American citizen and businessman. An outstanding testament to the power of the American dream, and the immigration opportunities that our forefathers intended....



3. Even though some parents don't know how or can't display their love in traditional ways, Peter Abeles' story shows that the love is still there. How much he and his brother loved each other was emphasized by the lack of expression by his parents. The beautiful part is how Peter learned how to express his love with the help of his wife Bonnie. Unfortunately, these lessons were learned after his parents' death. Everybody can learn from Peter's story.



4. The book takes you on a journey with a young boy named Otto. His family's trip from Vienna during the start of the Holocaust to their arrival in America. When Otto looks out the window he sees how everyone else around him live with loving parents. He finds no love in his own family except for Otto's brother Heinz Robert. Otto's success is due to hard work and long hours. This has taken him away from his own family. Eventually, the long hours at work pay off with success and family love and appreciation. A joy to read and to think about your own family's hardships and success. I am gald that my son-in-law (Joe) gave me this book to read.



5. Peter has done a beautiful job in describing the necessity of finding out about your past if you want experience peace in your life today and in the future. Often we don't want to look "back there" but the author shows us much courage and honesty in confronting the demons of his past and the healing that comes as a result.

No comments about From Anschluss to Albion.

5 comments about Diary of a Man in Despair: A Masterpiece about the Comprehension of Evil (Duck Editions).

1. I have read this book twice, once in the original edition and then this edition. It is a fabulous book.
   As to the Reck's aristocratic prejudice, this is something he is quite clear about, but he is a democrat as well -- hence he praises the opposition for being just that. Also, the individuals who really bear the brunt of his wrath are the Generals, the Junkers and the Kaiser before him who forsook their aristocratic upbringing, and sold out Germany long before Hitler took power, and then flirted with him as a novelty.
   
   It is hard to understand Reck's viewpoint without at least visiting or living in Germany and especially Bavaria -- which is a bit seperatist. Also, note his praise of the Munich uprising -- a communist uprising -- where people were still treated with diginity.
   
   His anger is with the sort of lowering of standards, the rise of the masses spurred on by hate, and constantly bombarded with propaganda. It is truly a remarkable book and one that has tremendous relevance for these times.



2. It's hard to believe this isn't a work of fiction. This guy is filled with hate and rage and loathing as he watches the German-speaking people descend into madness. Incredible writing, powerful ideas. Get it.



3. The title is a calumny. As his translator, Paul Rubens, points out, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen was a prophet - not in the vulgar sense of one who predicts future events, but a prophet after the fashion of Jeremiah, William Blake and Dostoyevsky: one who comments on the present from the perspective of the Most High. As such, even when his own death is imminent, Reck most certainly does not despair. Like the three individuals mentioned above, he is angered, disgusted, saddened and horrified by what he sees around him; his journal is filled with images of Calvary, the plague, and the Apocalypse; yet he continually strives to see his own and his country's ordeal as a time of suffering and repentance which must be endured to make way for a new and better world. None of which is to say that his thinking is "mystical" in the sense of being vague or escapist; indeed, the immense value of Reck's diary, both as literature and as a historical document, lies in its brilliant combination of sharp observation and lucid analysis. Although he makes the all-too-common error of lumping in the plotters of 20 July 1944 with the many opportunists who tried to dissociate themselves from the regime as defeat began to loom, Reck's analytical passages offer as clear and concrete a picture of the corruption underlying Hitler's Germany as any historian I have encountered. Telling details of life in the Third Reich - the omnipresent thuggery and tale-bearing, the forced barracks-gymnasium atmosphere, the all-pervasive lies and propaganda - spring out of every page through tartly written anecdotes and vignettes. The peculiar detestability of the Nazi functionaries - frustrated schoolteachers and jumped-up mailmen posing as masters of the world - is described and analysed with perception and admirable loathing. This elderly, conservative, royalist aristocrat - a member of a class who, because they did not support the Weimar Republic, are too often labelled supporters of the Nazis - displays a courage, intelligence, breadth of culture and (I cannot emphasise it enough) a faith which makes his journal as moving a human document as the more famous diary of Anne Frank.



4. It is true that Reck has a sense of class superiority to the Nazi's but that does not obscure his central point--he knew they were monsters--and he died for that. Counts for something you know. The invective is superb and more over Reck recognizes real resistance like the Scholl's (were they aristocrat?) and damns the generals assisanation plot as a an opportunistic move. Furthermore The Nazis crimes were pandemic--the annhilhation of the Jews, but also gypsies--and if one is making measurements which seems to me silly--the obliteration of 20,0000 soviet citizens. By the other reviewers logic if the destruction of the Jews is the question by which Germans will be judged, then Stalin becomes a heroe for saving the bulk of Soviet Jewry --sending them behind the Ural mountains--I don't think I want to go that route. It also explains why Israel refuses to make Dietrich Bonhoeffer a "rightious gentile" which is a scandal.
   No The Nazis were monsters such total monsters that any costly resistance derserves honor. This is the best anti-Nazi book theis Jew has ever read.



5. If, like me, you view the nazi era as a reaction against modernity, this is a book that will cause severe cognitive dissonance.It's Written by a member of the old Prussian aristocracy whose biggest problem with the nazis appears to be their populism. It's laden with classist terms like "canaille" and "mass-man" to the extent that he almost appears to blame german workers for their own alienation which led to the development of nazism. This is not the only dubious historical claim: he seems to believe that ndudstrailisationwas responsble fro the two world wars and not the other way around. Nevertheless, there are enough fascinating insights to make the book worthy of your attention, and it's worth bearing in mind that he wasn't writing with the same sense of historical distanciation that we have. Just remember, the worst thing about the nazis wasn't that they were boorish illiterate charlatans but that they killed 6 million jews and almost brought an end to western civilisation.

2 comments about The Bronski House.

1. Philip Marsden's book is a small masterpiece. It is poetic and evocative. He has a sharp sense of details. No wonder he has now written his first novel after a couple of travel books.
   Trough his friendship with Zofia Illinski and access to her mother's letters, diaries etc he portrays a lost world, the upper classes in Poland and Belarus between the wars, and how their world is completely shattered by it.
   The various personalities in the book are fascinating among them Zofia's mother who is an exceptional woman, strong, talented, beautiful and with a spirit that saves the family from extinction.
   Marsden's journey together with Zofia to her childhood is very moving.
   All in all this is a very good read. You don't have to be interested in Poland or in history and the likes. This book will interest and move you.



2. The language is so poetic and fluent, it hurls you away, lightly and fluffily to a different era; a world long gone and forgotten. It has something of an East European Gone With The Wind theme, only much more concise and fleetingly. I longed for more pages, a hundred more, fivehundred more, in this novel too timid and subdued somehow. Perfect script for a fullblown-no-expenses -spared Hollywood film!

5 comments about Passport to Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust.

1. Passport to Life is a must read. It is clearly written and engaging. Dr. Tanay's story of survival is moving and reminds us all of how the genocide of the Nazi's must never be forgotten. Like the story of Passover, it must be retold over and over to remind new generations of the risk. This is especially true post 9-11. His last few chapters begin to look at the modern problem of Islamic fundamentalists and hopefully foreshadow another great book.



2. When you pick up this book you will not be able to put it down. The "story" is a moment-to-moment recounting of daily survival. The situations that this young boy finds himself in are beyond the imagination of most people who have grown up in a country like America. The resourcefulness and intelligence necessary for a young teenager to survive each day, not knowing what will become of him the next, are not only an amazing and fascinating story, but a LIFE of a child. Not only did Dr. Tanay survive, he also saved his mother, sister and close childhood friend. His father suffered at the hands of Amos Goeth, infamously renowned for his role in the Plascow camp depicted in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List". Dr. Tanay's insight into his own plight, the plight of European Jewry as well as the psyche of hatred in religion and ideological movements is intelligent, moving and educational. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the human spirit and the analysis of societal and religious movements that can lead to assertions, beliefs and actions that are generated by arrogance of opinion.



3. Bring your thinking cap and your Kleenex box as this autobiographic analysis of the Holocaust years will grab both your intellect and your emotional senses. The writing style generates empathy and is sophisticated, yet easy reading. Amazing is Dr. Tanay's ability to add palatible, forensic psychological analysis to the terrifying events of his youth. His emphasis on thoroughness and accuracy is startling. His accomplishments as an adult, he recognizes, are dwarfed by his accomplishments in just four years during his teens. This very detailed and personal story of luck, skill, ingenuity, deception, devotion and love makes unique and fascinating reading. This should make a great film- I hope Spielberg is reading. This is a required read for Holocaust scholars and a desired read for those who "enjoy" a story of a boy's ability and will to be a survivor.



4. "PASSPORT to LIFE' by Dr. Emanuel Tanay brilliantly describes the heroic survival of an adolescent to save himself, his younger sister and his mother, through unbelievable circumstances, during the German occupation of Poland and Hungary in WWII.
   This autobiographical story describes a different type of holocaust survival, than those in the Nazi concentration camps.
   Mark Fintel (A holocaust survivor)



5. Passport To Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust is the firsthand story of Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a successful forensic psychiatrist and a Jew who survived the depredations of Nazi genocide during World War II, when he was only a child. After the war, his experienced hatred and the threat of murder in his native Poland, but relative peace and asylum in Germany, and later moved to America. Sixty years later, his testimony is not only a narration of and reflection upon the genocidal atrocities he personally witnessed and experienced. It reveals the struggles of survivors to cling to life to be heroic and resourceful, in a situation where lack of power and arms among Jews in general meant that direct resistance against the Nazis would only guarantee personal extermination. Passport To Life is also an erudite and scholarly treatise on the nature of hatred, and the core human impulses that are all too easily channeled into sadistic and masochistic fervor ("you have to be carefully taught not to hate", the author warns), whether by organized religion, ideology, totalitarian government, or other sources. Passport To Life is particularly vital in that it deconstructs mythologies that have arisen about the Holocaust. For example, the author was personally present in Warsaw at the time the Uprising began, and warns against characterizing it as a true rebellion, since it claimed the lives of very few German soldiers and had zero military impact upon the course of the war. Rather, he characterizes it as a mass suicide of Jews who preferred to die from German guns rather than be sent to Treblinka. Since World War II there has been a tendency to overdramatize or exaggerate Christian rescues of Jewish people; Tanay respects the nobility of those who did so but also carefully delineates examples in which the truth is lost to the need to mythologize history and a few make good men into saints rather than confront the overall horror of what really happened. Tanay further dissects with clinical expertise the nature of hared itself, demonstrating that the most virulent hatreds are perpetrated against individuals or groups the hater knows nothing about, or believes fantasies about; hatred is not borne of logic or reason, and therefore rationality is no defense against it. Emphasizing the critical importance of broadcasting a counter-message to the many widespread propaganda of hate today, including but not limited to hatred against unbelievers spread within specific Islamic states, Passport To Life offers the key to understanding and hopefully preventing worse geneocidal deprevations in the future. Though it deals with complex psychological issues, Passport To Life is written in plain terms that invite no confusion regardless of the readers' level of familiarity with history or psychology. Passport To Life is far, far more than an autobiographical memoir. It is more than a record of Holocaust atrocities. It is quite literally the embodiment of its title, an indispensible contribution to Holocaust literature shelves and psychology shelves, and bears the absolute highest recommendation to school libraries, public libraries, Holocaust literature collections, scholars and lay readers alike. Do not pass up this book.