1 comments about Movement: A Memoir of Disability, Cancer, and the Holocaust.

1. This book is a remarkable, upbeat, positive and at times even light-hearted description of a life led under the shadow of "disability, cancer and the Holocaust". Readers will enjoy seeing how one can build a happy productive life filled with all sorts of amazing and even bizarre experiences, even if life has dealt one extraordinary personal challenges. Now, in the interests of "full disclosure", I should note that I have known Bill Roth personally for a number of years and consequently cannot claim to be completely objective either about the man or his book. That said, I am convinced that even a reader who has not had the opportunity to know Roth will enjoy this book. Although the word "inspiring" is often overused in describing people who have overcome disabilities, in the case of Bill Roth and his book Movement the term is entirely appropriate. What's more, Movement is a lot fun to read!

No comments about Buchenwald: A Survivor's Memories.

2 comments about The Warriors: My Life As A Jewish Soviet Partisan (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. There is a wealth of information in this book, notably a detailed map of relevant locations. I primarily focus on matters not elaborated by other reviewers.
   
   Zissman describes a time a prewar Poland during which he had a rosy view of Communism. He does not explain how he could have thought this in view of such things as the ruthless totalitarianism and the removal of Jews from top positions in the Soviet Union by Stalin in the mid-1930's. Or how could he be ignorant of these facts?
   
   In 1939, the Soviets occupied then-eastern Poland, a territory with a mixed Polish-Byelorussian-Jewish population. Zissman essentially confirms some historians (e. g., Jerzy Robert Nowak) as to the major cause of Jews being sent to Siberia: Jews manifesting their intent of going to the German-occupied zone (p. 29).
   
   Zissman describes the existence of a Polish militia which briefly served the Germans after their 1941 invasion: "Then they began arresting those who had worked for the Soviets." (pp. 41-42). Later, the Germans shot the Poles along with the Jews (p. 47). Poles who continued to serve the Germans clearly did it under duress: "If he [the Polish guard] dared show any mercy to the Jews, they [the Germans] would shoot him or send him to a concentration camp." (p. 53)
   
   In common with some other Jewish sources (e. g.,Deliverance: The Diary of Michael Maik, a True Story), Zissman confirms the fact that Germans, not Poles, were the main killers of Jedwabne's Jews: "Later on, some Jews who had fled Jedwabno for Derechin told us that when the Germans first entered their town, they had herded all the Jews into a barn and set it ablaze. Anyone who tried to get out was cut down by machine-gun fire." (p. 42). [The discovery of WWI-vintage bullet casings at the site doesn't disprove their connection with the Jedwabne massacre. The Germans probably relegated obsolete weaponry to the shootings of unarmed civilians.]
   
   Bor Komorowski gave an order for the AK to liquidate bandits who were preying on Polish farmers. Apropos to this, Zissman mentions bandit bands of Soviet soldiers who had been trapped behind German lines after the 1941 invasion (p. 78). Later, Zissman was a member of one of the "pozorny" groups that masqueraded as the AK: "When carrying out `bombings' [bandit raids], we impersonated Polish Underground fighters, the point being to discredit the White Poles with the farmers. From the farms, besides food and clothing, we took naphtha, saws, and axes--the farmers would miss these things most of all." (p. 149). How many crimes attributed to the AK (including the killings of fugitive Jews) were actually the deeds of the "pozornys"?
   
   After the Soviet "liberation" of Poland in 1944, Zissman was approached by a Jewish NKVD officer and invited to join (pp. 161-162). He did.
   
   Zissman comments on the reaction to Jewish owners returning for their properties: "Besides not wanting to give up their loot, they [current owners] feared being sent to Siberia as collaborators. Many were ready to kill any returning Jews." (p. 161). Could the fear of being accused of Nazi collaboration, ipso facto for possessing Jewish property, been itself, in many other such instances, a significant motivator for killing returning Jewish owners?



2. Too often have I read memoirs from Jewish partisans who served either with the Poles, Ukrainians or in this case Russians and Byelorussia and the sad fact that they had to face anti-semitism within these partisan groups and detachments. Again and again they would prove themselves to be resilient fighters, brave soldiers, and heroic warriors when the time came in the heat of battle. Some lived through it all but many more would die and their stories need to be heard, understood and remembered. Not only suffering from the Germans and their local collaborators but also at the hands of the same people whom they sought out for help and protecting and more so to simply join to seek vengeance. This book is a small glimpse into that world, a world where the enemy might be a man you called a friend not too long ago and someone whom you entrusted your life to in a split second decision when had yet to lose faith in humanity and the generous spirit you know people must have deep down inside. Yet the end result more often than not was betrayal, death, starvation, torture, and torment. Stories abound of the dozens of actions undertaken by these partisans and the huge amount of damage they were able to do to the Germans and locals who were helping them. At the same time we are also told about the German responses to these actions, local people who might have had nothing to do with it were robbed, beaten, and killed for simply being at the wrong place and at the wrong time. War is war, I only wish that the author had included everything in this book, sadly he himself says that he left out stories of 'cruelty, inhumanity, and atrocity.' I think that was a mistake on his part, the more we know the better informed we'll be and hopefully we might avert something like this from ever happening again.

No comments about Remembering Georgy: Letters from the House of Izieu.

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.

1 comments about Soundless Roar: Stories, Poems, and Drawings.

1. Quite simply, you will find it difficult to find another Holocaust text quite like Soundless Roar.
   
   Ava Kadishson Schieber, born in Novi Sad near Belgrade, was a teenager when her parents decided that the best chance of survival was for each family member to go his or her own way. In telling her memories of being forced into solitary hiding, Schieber unpacks her lost adolescence in a way that reveals both unimaginable loss and extraordinary acceptance.
   
   By inviting you to "construct your own image" from her collection of drawings, poems, and short stories, Schieber does not allow you to settle on simple interpretations or superficial lessons. Instead, readers will be taken on a frightening yet gentle journey - encountering Schieber's "friendly ghosts" along the way - that will leave them mystified, refreshed, and inspired.
   
   Somehow, Schieber takes her readers through the world of the Holocaust, including a brief glimpse into the Nazi death camps. It is as if she is leading each reader by the hand, as we discover with her the strength of the human spirit and her own personal tragedies.
   
   Schieber's astounding honesty challenges her readers' preconceptions of what being a survivor means. In a way, she also forces her readers to confront their understandings of oppression in society today. Importantly, her ability to write both simply and abstractly makes Soundless Roar a piece of art that is accessible to teenagers and scholars alike.

3 comments about BONES OF BERDICHEV: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman.

1. Even having grown up in the USSR, and having some experience with my family and their stories of survival of WW2 and Stalin era, I still found the bok incredible and moving. so did my college-age kids! I would suggest it to more people who are interested in the topic 100%



2. I am greatly impressed with this book. I'm an emigrant from the former USSR, Jew myself, and I thought that I know everything about our life, about the war and the suffering of Soviet Jews from Nazi and from the Soviet Communists. But I discovered so many new facts that I never new. I am amazed how deep the authors understoon the reality of Soviet life. I lived in Belorus for years and didn't even hear anything about mass graves of Jews that are everywhere in this country. We were never told about it! I wish this book will be translated into Russian and Ukranian languages. I remember, that Soviet people can hardly knew who's is Vasily Grossman, one of the greatest writers of the century.



3. The book is a basic read for anyone interested in the Holocaust, WWII, Soviet life, and Soviet literature. The Garrard's reveal the quality of Grossman's writings and his personal sacrifices in seeing his opus, Life and Fate, published after being smuggled from the USSR. Accounts in the book of Stalingrad, Nazi crimes in Berdichev, and Grossman's slow literary descent into obscurity will be little read by a complacent Western public more interested in Star Wars than in the trauma that real wars have produced in this century. I was moved by the book and enlightened about the enduring spirit of mankind in the face of repression. Highly recommended!!

1 comments about And The World Closed Its Doors: The Story Of One Family Abandoned To The Holocaust.

1. And the World Closed Its Doors
   The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust
   By David Clay Large
   BASIC BOOKS; 278 PAGES; $26.00
   
   Reviewed by Howard J. De Nike
   
   There is irony in Leopold von Ranke furnishing the template for "And the World Closed Its Doors: The Story of One Family Abandoned to the Holocaust," by David Clay Large. Ranke, the great 19th Century German historiographer, inaugurated a scientific approach to history, insisting upon contemporary, firsthand sources. Large, a history professor at Montana State University and part-time San Francisco resident, takes this dictum to heart.
   Ranke's exhortation prefigures the modern canons of "social history." Exploiting personal letters, family albums, diaries, census records, polling tallies, and the like, a diligent researcher will be able to piece together an accurate narrative, one ultimately more trustworthy than offered by after-the-fact, self-anointed chroniclers.
   Large, whose previous work includes a definitive book on Berlin (2000) and a volume (co-authored with Felix Gilbert), that in its fifth edition is reputedly the greatest selling 20th Century European history text, takes advantage of a trove of letters exposing the increasingly despairing efforts by a German Jew, Max Schohl, to extricate himself and his family from the looming debacle.
   In 1938, Schohl opened correspondence with Julius Hess, a cousin he had never met, in Charlestown, West Virginia. The objective was to enlist his relative's aid in emigrating to the U.S. Instead Max suffered a continuum of frustration owed to FDR's documented pre-war policy denying desperately sought asylum to the bulk of Europe's Jews. That Germany recognized Max Schohl's heroism during the First World War by bestowing various combat honors, and that Max reciprocated with unstinting patriotism adds mockery to the unrelenting Nazi drumbeat.
   Alternating the letters between Schohl and his American cousin with a straight-forward telling of Roosevelt's tight-fisted diplomacy, Large does the rationale of social history proud: To reveal the effects of "great forces" upon individuals and the consequent actions of those individuals. Over half a decade, the Family Schohl attempted to emigrate, first to the U.S., then England, followed by Chile and Brazil, all to equal futility. Throughout, the reader knows the outcome - death at Auschwitz for Max, survival after forced labor for his wife and two daughters. But this hardly diminishes the suspense achieved through Large's taut prose and adept use of materials.
   Max Schohl, a distinguished chemist, owned a successful firm on the outskirts of Frankfurt. Never eschewing his Jewish roots, Schohl became a pillar of community life in the village of Florsheim, where he was a chief employer of the townspeople. During the worst times of the 1920s economic collapse, he ran a soup-kitchen and paid his employees in hard currency in place of virtually worthless German marks, a barrel-full of which might purchase a loaf of bread.
   Local esteem did Schohl and his family no good, however, during the infamous Kristallnacht. As with thousands of other Jews, thugs invaded the Schohl household on November 7, 1938, part of a Germany-wide attack. Shortly afterward, security officers took Max into "protective" custody and delivered him to Buchenwald concentration camp. Though his incarceration lasted but a month, the handwriting was on the wall, and Schohl redoubled his correspondence with Hess. Meanwhile, FDR contented himself with a perfunctory ambassadorial recall, and Hitler "billed" the Jews of Germany a billion marks as an "atonement fine" for cleaning up Kristallnacht debris.
   A hard-hearted dilemma confronted the Schohls. On one hand, under U.S. immigration law Max had to demonstrate that he was not "likely to become a public charge," while on the other, the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, aimed at barring Chinese, prohibited would-be immigrants from securing jobs prior to entry. As Large declares acerbically, "The famed lines on the Statue of Liberty might have been rewritten to say: `To hell with your huddled masses, send me your prosperous and well-connected, your stockholders, remittance men, and prospective heirs.' "
   Though the Schohls' predicament was replicated a thousand-fold across pre-war Europe, there is enormous value in hearing its firsthand voices. Not only are general lessons about bureaucratic impersonality on offer, but about national blindness, as well. Whether they are Salvadorans fleeing Death Squads or Liberians facing slaughter by run-amok revolutionaries, those with the power to open the nation's safe harbor must ask themselves to what extent policy is driven by racial stereotyping and narrowly defined self-interest.
   ________________________________________________________________________
   Howard J. De Nike is a Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at San Francisco State University.

1 comments about Eva's Journey: A Young Girl's True Story.

1. Eva Bromberg has the misfortune of coming into adolescence just as the Nazis invade her homeland. Eva and her father move about Poland, seeking safe haven. After soldiers take her dad and the other Jewish men in town, Eva realizes that he is dead and that she must flee.

   From 1941 to 1945, the blonde girl passes as a Christian, dodging repeated brushes with discovery and death. Ultimately the war ends, and Eva finds freedom with her mother and brother in Palestine.

   As an adult, Eva immigrated to the United States, married, and raised a family. Now a grandmother named Hava Ben-Zvi, she has finally published her thrilling story.

   Ben-Zvi, a librarian, tailors her novella-length narrative to young teens, students who are near the age she was when she began her "journey". She includes a simple timeline of the World War II and a bibliography of books about children who endured the Holocaust and other atrocities such as American slavery and Hiroshima.

   Eva's Journey is not just a lesson in history; it is a terrific read that belongs in every public and school library. For Hava Ben-Zvi is more than an educator and wonderful writer. She is Eva Bromberg--the girl who lived.

5 comments about A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry.

1. This is a must book for book clubs and reading groups! Isenberg's writing is engaging as she tells of Varian Fry's dramatic actions that saved so many people from harm. But, more thrillingly, through skillful use of private documents, she shows her readers how a man who showed little previous signs of special distinction, not content to stay a bystander, was willing to put himself at risk to help strangers whose lives were in danger. The book will spark discussions, not only of the holocaust, but of our continuing search to lead ethical lives today in the face of widespread violence, famine and continuing human rights abuses.



2. this story, of a true 'hero,' makes a compelling read. how amazing that fry managed to save so many important artists of the last century and was little known until isenberg's book. a good read while learning an important bit of our history. i will definitely recommend this to my book club.



3. I read Sheila Isenberg's marvelous book, A Hero Of Our Own, in one sitting. What made it compelling was the author's logical, step-by-step approach to the stunning chaos of her hero's dilemma.
   Varian Fry's defining year in Marseilles came alive line by line, stroke by inspiring stroke in clear logical matter of fact tones. The work is poignant and powerful, mythic documentary proof of a bona fide hero and his heroic friends confronting the petty viciousness of evil with clear-eyed will.

   A beautiful important book. This is History as it ought to be written. Should be required reading in high schools and colleges round the globe.




4. For someone like myself, who enjoys a really exciting story, preferably about a real person,one need go no further than to read "A Hero of Our Own" by Sheila Isenberg. Varian Frye, a not-so-ordinary American, feels impelled to leave his comfortable life as a writer and editor and go to France as a member of the Emergency Rescue Committe (ERC) and risk his life to save as many refugees (mostly Jews) as he can from the Nazis. Frye is the only American to be honored at Yad Vashem (Israel's Holocaust Memorial) because of his work in saving thousands of Jews. If I didn't know it was a true story, I'd think it was fiction because his adventures read like a fast-paced thriller, a veritable realization of the classic "film noir" of the forties. In fact, I feelthe book cries out to be made into a movie which I would be happy to see. Of course some of the book's revealed facts about our own State Department trying to keep refugee Jews from entering the United States when they knew it mean certain death was quite shocking and disturbing. However, all in all, I'd recommend the book to anyone who enjoys reading a fast-paced book about real heros and history.



5. Varian Fry was an American hero, risking his life to save others, unrecognized during his lifetime, but, fortunately, with Isenberg's new biography, now about to become a well-known figure. Called the artists' Schindler, Fry saved about 1,500 artists, writers, teachers, labor leaders, activists, and others from Hitler -- Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, and Hannah Arendt among the group. A Hero of Our Own tells Fry's story in a lively, compelling style. One can't wait to turn the page to find out what happens in Nazi-ridden, Vichy-controlled Marseille 1940. Who will be saved? Who will be turned over to the Gestapo? Why did Fry risk his life? This book answers all these questions in a fascinating story that is well worth reading -- as Fry is well worth remembering and honoring.