5 comments about The Narrow Bridge: BEYOND THE HOLOCAUST.

1. I am not as eloquent as some others who have provided their perspectives, but I wanted to share my thoughts on this great book and author nonetheless. I live in NYC but grew up in Champaign, IL recognizing that Rabbi Neuman was and is a very bright and strong-willed man who packs great wisdom into relatively few words. But only after reading this book, and the brutality and hardships he faced, obstacles so great they are hard for most of us to even fathom, could I, or most anyone, fully appreciate the depth of his strength and courage. I have read very good books that more fully illustrate the details of the day-to-day murder and brutality (books such as Ordinary Men and Treblinka), but Rabbi Neuman makes it clear that not only were numerous innocent people murdered, but many wonderful communities and ways of life were forever destroyed. And yet, he, like many others, found the strength to move beyond the worst event in human history in order to make a difference and help others. This is among the must read books for anyone who wants to understand what was lost, particularly in Poland, in the genocide and devastation of the holocaust, all the while getting to learn about the courage and strength of survivors like Rabbi Isaac Neuman. Thank you for everything Rabbi Neuman!



2. Rabbi Neuman tells his story starting through the eyes of a young boy and ending through the eyes of an elder Rabbi. The Story is told in a calm and matter of fact manner, leaving the adjectives describing the German brutality to the mind of the reader. Thus, the reader can get a much broader picture of the times without getting hung up with anger at specific transgressions. Most everyone would enjoy this book, but especially anyone who is old enough to remember the time when all this was happening.



3. Rabbi Nueman tells his story starting through the eyes of a young boy and ending through the eyes of an elder Rabbi. The Story is told in a calm and matter of fact manner, leaving the adjectives describing the German brutality to the mind of the reader. Thus, the reader can get a much broader picture of the times without getting hung up with anger at specific transgressions. Most everyone would enjoy this book, but especially anyone who is old enough to remember the time when all this was happening.



4. Rabbi Nueman tells his story starting through the eyes of a young boy and ending through the eyes of an elder Rabbi. The Story is told in a calm and matter of fact manner, leaving the adjectives describing the German brutality to the mind of the reader. Thus, the reader can get a much broader picture of the times without getting hung up with anger at specific transgressions. Most everyone would enjoy this book, but especially anyone who is old enough to remember the time when all this was happening.



5. In the Narrow Bridge: Beyond the Holocaust, Isaac Neuman set himself the most of difficult of tasks to write the "silent song of my vanished people.

   He succeeds so well in invoking the presence of those who are absent that this reader feels as if he had sat at the study table of Reb Mendel as he taught a page of Talmud and told ancient stories that echo again and again the most contemporary of wisdom. The memoir is passionate and deep, religious in its intensity, and yet so very compassionate in its understanding.

   Isaac Neuman makes the characters of his past come alive. We gain an insight into the world that ways and is no longer. We learn the streets of his beloved cities and its courtyards, more importantly we are privileged to enter the inner lives of its inhabitants. Unlike most Holocaust memoirs, which are most intense in their portrayal of the evil the survivors experienced, Neuman is most passionate about the past that has vanished and most successful at calling it forth.

   Religious Jews will hear the echoes of Jewish legends in the last moments of minyan of martyrs who accepted their decree with dignity and had more faith in the divine that a God present in the Holocaust could ever possibly merit. Secular readers will read of Passover in the camps and glimpse the power of tradition to speak forth even in the most atrocious of circumstances. They will experience the consolation of the invocation of a miraculous, redemptive past in a world without miracles, without hope.

   This lyrical work will touch the soul. One laughs, one cries, one mourns and indeed one even celebrates. Restrained prose glisten with insight. The work is deep, passionate, charming -- and ever so welcome.

   Michael Berenbaum

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).

1 comments about My War: Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. Edward Stankiewicz begins by describing his life in prewar Warsaw--his schooling, early love of Latin, and graduation from his gymnasium in 1939 shortly before the German invasion--and his escape to the Soviet-occupied zone. In Lwow (Lemberg) where he attended the university as a student of classics, he began writing Yiddish poems and joined the Writers' Club where he met other Jewish and Polish writers.

   After the Germans occupied Lwow, he was forced to work in a factory that provided the German army with leather and pelts. Later, in a German uniform, he fled to the Ukraine where he wandered from town to town for several months until he was captured by the Gestapo, beaten, and sent to Buchenwald.

   There, as a Pole hiding his Jewish identity, he ended up working as a scribe in the block for sick and dying prisoners. He also managed to continue writing poems, some of which are reproduced in this book.

   As hellish as Buchenwald was, the fact that its political prisoners had for the most part wrested control of its inner workings from the camp's criminal prisoners, meant that there was something of a buffer between the prisoners and the SS in charge of the camp. This situation allowed the prisoners to exact their own justice. Twice Stankiewicz saw prisoners kill other prisoners who had been kapos at other camps ("Buchenwald was meting out justice the prisoners' way."). Toward the end of the book the author describes the day--April 11, 1945--the camp was liberated by the Americans.

   The author's passion for poetry and language runs like a thread through the entire book (he is professor emeritus of Slavic linguistics and literary theory at Yale University). His memoir is an important source of new information and insights about previously little known aspects of wartime Eastern European intellectual life, as well as a moving story of survival against incredible odds.

   --Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

No comments about Against All Odds (Radcliffe Press).

3 comments about In the Lion's Mouth: Gisi Fleischmann & the Jewish Fight for Survival.

1. Gisi Fleischmann's pre-Holocaust life was unexceptional, but the woman, it turned out, was not. Strong both in moral principle and in determination to act, effective both as an inspiration to others and as a doer, Fleischmann set her whole being to the task of saving Jewish lives--in exchange, inevitably, for her own. The story of her activities and those of her Slovakian colleagues has been kept alive in memory through the exhaustive research of Joan Campion. Based on archival materials and on interviews with surviving family members and friends, the book describes the real-life nightmare in a way that is the more disturbing for being low-keyed. Our only consolation is our recognition that here was a heroine.

   Notes, bibliography, archival and interview sources, and index are included.




2. There are a hundred ways to tell the story of the Holocaust. Books have been written on the history, sociology, psychology and political conditions that contributed to the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The most moving books on the Holocaust, however, often concentrate on the fate of a family or an individual. "The Diary of Anne Frank" comes immediately to mind. Joan Campion has chosen that personal approach to tell the story of Gisi Fleischmann and her efforts to save Slovakian Jews. The resulting book brings back to life a strong, courageous woman. She appears to have been quite an ordinary woman who showed great bravery and intelligence in dealing with extraordinary challenges. In their efforts to destroy millions of innocent people, the Nazis also destroyed potential. We can never know what art, music, literature and scientific discoveries were lost in the death camps. But thanks to Joan Campion, another of Hitler's victims will be remembered, and he is denied another posthumous victory.



3. Over the years, when friends and I have discussed the Holocaust and the way in which the courageous acts of certain individuals made a difference in thousands of lives, names such as that of Raoul Wallenberg would inevitably be mentioned. I would bring up the name Gisi Fleischmann, because I had had the good fortune to read "In the Lion's Mouth," and to learn of her all-but-unknown efforts to call international attention to the plight of Slovakian Jews in the latter years of World War II.

   Joan Campion's fluid narrative deftly guides the reader through the series of audacious negotiations and plans undertaken by Fleischmann and her colleagues to stave off the impending "Final Solution." The story's drama is heightened by Fleischmann's devotion to the work of saving as many people as possible- especially children -while being torn with anxiety for the safety of her own family.

   There are people still living to whom Gisi Fleischmann did, indeed, make a difference. How wonderful that, thanks to Campion's efforts, her story is once again available in a world language!

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

1 comments about Return to the Hiding Place.

1. During the Nazi occupation of Holland there was a quiet family of watchmakers, the ten Boons. When they saw the evil of the Nazi regiem they decided to do what there Christian fiath required of them to hide those who were being hunted. They hid eight people (7 I believe were Jewish) as a result when the ten
   Booms were captured by the Nazi's the elderly father died, the two daughter's ended up in Buchenwald concentration camp. The eldest Betsey died at the camp, but her younger sister Corrie was released due to a clerical error. She went on to bring healing to the lives of many people, including her persecuters.

   This book tells the story from the eyes of one of the young men hidden by the ten Booms. He tells life from his perspective. Out of the eight people hidden by the ten Booms only one died during the war. The Nazi's did not find them in "The Hiding Place" ( a hidden room in Corrie ten Booms closet) but after they were moved to safe houses some of them were raided. This is a tale of courage, faith, and conviction. The story of some unlikly heroes from the perspective of the people they helped. Enjoy!!!

1 comments about Convoy To Auschwitz: Women of the French Resistance (Women's Life Writings from Around the World).

1. I am so glad that this book was translated to english and published here in the States. Please, don't get me wrong, but it is "nice" to have a book about other victims of the Nazi death camps besides Jewish accounts. It serves to remind us and teach us that others too were sentenced to those Death Camps. Many gypsies, resisters, communists, christians, and lesbians, all from different countries, EVEN GERMANS, were sentenced and died at the camps. This book in particular is a Who's Who, a list of a convoy of resisters (mostly communists) from France (mostly french, but there were other nationalities as well) who lived and died together. Each name has a story, some more than others. Stories from the survivors and from what relatives that could be found after the war.

   It's amazing that this book was first published in 1965 and is only now being published here in the US. But I'm glad I got to read it.

2 comments about The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.

1. Hillberg wrote this as a Phd thesis, and therefore it is a carefully researched book. I have an original copy signed by the author, and it came at a time to be my first major purchase on the subject. I had a chance to hear him speak a couple of years ago and brought my copy along. He was amazed that any still existed. Because of the purpose, it is not a "story," but a well done place for any one serious in learning could well start. His beginning statement of the eras of Jewish history is still the best I've ever hear in the 45 yrs. of collecting--read it and see.



2. The memoir is a much needed supplement for the scholarly works of undoubtedly peerless Holocaust researcher. All the process of transforming of Holocaust studies from metaphysical reflections into a scholarly discipline is revealed before our eyes, with almost tragic touch of author's own fate as "controversial"(for some) and plagiated scholar. And also a personal note: Gauleiter Kube, a much maligned Hitler's boss of Belorussia, got in Hillberg's magnum opus Destruction of European Jews some flesh and blood which made me understand better the Holocaust reality in my native land.
   

   Hilberg's works are surely uneasy reading for those who perceive the Holocaust through a comforting model reduced to "... a more familiar picture of a struggle-- however unequal--between combatants" (p.135).
   

   The language of the book is unusual and its laconism , though sometimes veiling the sense, is accompanied by inner dramatic beauty and power.
   

   In general, Hilberg's memoir is a mind-nourishing and thought-provoking book, a must for anyone with an interest in history of the 20th century.

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.