No comments about Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (Routledge Twentieth Century European History).

5 comments about Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years.

1. A diary can be as interesting as the person who writes it is and Mihail Sebastian is a complex character. I liked the way he documents his love exploits, the illusions and the hopes he has, his love of music as the ultimate refuge, the detailed account of writing his best novel, "The accident", and his plays, the total sincerity and subjectivity. There are so many nuances in the friendships he keeps - like the one with Mircea Eliade, Iron Guard legionaire and his friend for more than 15 years, like Camil Petrescu, colourful and overconfident writer, and many more.
   When reading the diary, you come to know the frivolous Romanian interbellic "elites", the painful exploits of literary creation, friendships streched by political divide, the uncertainty of the war, the humiliation of the Jews during fascism. Besides, Sebastian's writing style is beautiful and easy to follow.
   This book is mostly perceived as an account of the Holochaust in Romania. However, it has much more to offer. Not only the grim and the militant view of the events, but the full caleidoscope of Sebastian's personna.



2. First of all, the "Journal" is exquisitly written.
   Then, this is The Book for understanding multiple facets of life in war-time Romania, shining light on previously hidden places.

   A note of strong dissagreement with a previuos reviewer's assesment of reasons for which the book is supposedly absent from Romanian bookstores:

   This book is not "out of print" in its original version, it has been printed multiple times (last time in 2002) and is available as we speak. It is being bought off the shelves like fresh bread every time Humanitas re-prints it.
   Thousands and thousands of Romanians bought, read, discussed, reviewed and raved about the Journal. We were changed by it, as any other feeling human would! Countless echoes in the press, radio and TV shows were generated by this publication.

   Sebastian's Journal became a cornerstone of our perception of Romania's past, not just for a handful of passionate readers but for a whole nation.
   Noam, research before you write.




3. This is a unique document from any perspective you approach it. I found it particularly revealing about my father's background; Bucharest's middle class before WWII. The author came from a Jewish community who regarded itself as an assimilated part of a basically friendly Rumania. The amicable feelings towards Rumania have always run deep in its Jewish expatriates. Those who immigrated to Israel recreated a piece of pre-war Bucharest in Tel-Aviv. The book's description of a specific social set fascinates, with its elegant frivolity and gregarious bonhomie that was stifled under Ceausescu, but survived in my parent's social circle and in that of the Rumanian Jewish community.

   Sebastian parades a delightful set of characters. From the comical Prince Antoine Bibescu, who walks to theatre among the barbarians "en pantoufles," to the playwright Eugène Ionesco, Sebastian's pen never fails to capture the essence his friends' personalities. Ionesco is mentioned only in passing but his predicament is sobering, if not unique. He was not able to keep his job because of his mother's Jewish background. Ionesco, who never identified himself as Jewish, had not experienced life as a minority and had difficulties dealing with his new status. Apparently he had an emotional breakdown before he finally succeeded in returning to France. I do not think that Ionesco or his biographers ever expounded on that chapter of his life from this perspective. What he had experienced in Rumania at the time may explain the inspiration for his play, Rhinocéros (1958).

   This amusing social tapestry is but a background and introduction to the real drama of this diary. The author portrays the gradual evolution of a very sinister external reality, and more significantly, his own reactions to it. It illustrates a difficult and conflictual internal process of disillusionment, of realigning one's internal alliances, or, perhaps, the creeping realization that your friends are turning into rhinoceroses. As the author discovers during the peak of the persecutions, this is a process many assimilated Jews went through in past centuries under similar circumstances.

   Sebastian refers to his homeland as "a Balkan swamp," where people change political affiliations like they change their shirts (something at which Ionesco's father was particularly good). He makes some lucid observations about Rumanian Jews' easy optimism and, contrary to common belief, the Jews' short memory of past tragedies. This selective amnesia of prior calamities is an attitude prevalent among Rumanian Jews in Israel, who nurture a sympathetic viewpoint about the events described in this book.

   Indeed, this book confronts basic notions many people hold about that era of Rumanian history; making it highly controversial. My parents are a perfect illustration of the strong but contradictory feelings it arouses. My mother, deported from Cernauti (Chernovitz) in Bucovina to a concentration camp with the rest of her family, had no problems accepting Sebastian's account. My father, on the other hand, who hails from Bucharest, responded with disbelief to my reports about my revelations from the text. He remembered many of the events reported, for example the confiscation of the radios and the forced labor, but he refused to put it in any special context. His recollection was suffused with what seemed to me like heavy denial of the meaning and purpose of the regime's behavior. He combined this with a peculiar version of the history of those times, and a disturbing set of rationalizations of events ("it was only the Iron Guard," or, "everybody I knew survived"). He agreed to read the book, but after he received it, changed his mind and refused. Needless to say, my family, like many others, has never reached an agreement about the basic facts of the period. Another way of understanding the kind of condoning spirit displayed by my father is that it is representative of ethnic minorities' traditionally docile attitude towards authority. This deference, accentuated by fear, may also explain how millions of Jews were gullible enough to allow the Nazis to gas them. The Israelis' intransigence represents a backlash against generations of this servile obeisance, not unlike the kind of militant political transformation experienced by American blacks in the 20th century.




4. The fabricated myth, by the Roumanian Nationalists, that Roumania was a "good" place to be for a Jew, during the Holocaust is to be completely and forever forgotten. From the accounts of Mihail Sebastian, it is obvious that the Roumanian intelligentia, the literary circles were filled with Legionairs that spreed antisemitism in a most vicious manner. The German SS Killing Detachments were, according to Eichman's testimony during his trial, abhorred and disgusted by the crude cruelty of the Roumanian troups during the deportation of the Jewish population from Bassarabia to camps in Transnistria. The Roumanian Nation as a whole, is guilty of the extermination of is Jewish population, collectively the Nation should repent just like the Germans. This of course requires self-examination, admission and a certain degree of intelligence. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the true socio-political climat in Roumania during WW2.



5. Mikhail Sebastian was the Romanian Walter Benjamin. Trained as a lawyer and a literary critic, Sebastian published a highly-regarded novel at the age of 23. He held one of those literary-functionary jobs requiring very little actual work or presence at the office which Europe once awarded to its philosophers and artists. Like Benjamin, Sebastian was a skittish, highly personable writer: a professional skeptic, an independent thinker, who could amuse himself indefinitely with his own thoughts and company.

   To see the War through Sebastian's eyes in this diary is to finally understand it. The journal - together with Radu Ioanid's recently published history of the Romanian holocaust - certainly explodes the myth that Romania was a "good" place to be Jewish during WW2. In fact, the Antonescu's wartime government - reactive always to the country's popular ultra-fascist Iron Guard - annhilated half the country's Jews, some 150,000 people. The "cut" was purely geographic: Bessarabia and Bukovina, two cities bordering Odessa with large Jewish populations, were targeted for ethnic cleansing; whereas the Jews of Bucharest were merely subject to statutes barring their employment, use of amenities, etc. But what's most extraordinary about the Journals is the way that it gives this kind of victimage-by-chance a human face: curious and halting.

   Over the course of two years, Sebastian is exiled from the inner circles of the Bucharest literati. His close friends and mentors, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, have become intelletual leaders of the Iron Guard. Sebastian waits in Bucharest, increasingly unemployable due to anti-Semitic statutes and restrictions, borrowing money to pay the rent while fully aware of the massacres and pogroms that were taking place in the northern regions of his country.

   The apartments of Bucharest Jews were confiscated; and then their telephones; and then eventually their skis?! Each week brought new onslaughts of mad and crippling restrictions. Sebastian notes tbe "mute despair that has become a kind of Jewish greeting." He witnesses this, with no illusions, while trying to piece together a subsistence living for himself and his parents, at times writing plays which would be produced under the names of non-Jewish friends, which he was eventually best known for.

   Sebastian never married; he had a number of simultaneous & consecutive affairs with married and independent women, as was the custom at that time and place. He had no children. He has a great sense of vocation as a writer and a thinker, and this Journal comes closer than any document I've read to conveying a sense of the "dazed stupor ... with no room for gestures, feeling, words" that comes from living alongside horror.

2 comments about This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz.

1. Every story that is told about someone who witnessed the war during the years of WW2 is incredible. Its sometimes hard to read about these events over and over, but the enormity of it all is almost beyond belief. This is a fast read and the foreword and afterword are important additions to the story as written.



2. This account of an Italian family's brutal experience at the hands of the Nazis is riveting. Ms. Sonnino writes in a spare, unflinching style. What isn't spared is the horror that she and her beloved family endured. From safe house to safe house, to their discovery, to their horrific journey to the the death camps in Poland, to their hearbreaking seperation, to the inhuman treatment they suffered with such dignity, it is a tale I will never forget. This book will take its place as required reading for anyone who wants to understand the depths to which humans can fall, and the effort that one woman made to rise above it somehow.

1 comments about Pilgrim Among the Shadows/a Memoir (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book).

1. I am reading "Pilgrim Among the Shadows" by Boris Pahor (Orlando, FL, 1995, Harcourt Brace & Co.), a translation by Michael Biggins from the Slovenian of "Nekropola." It appears to be the only work by Pahor to have been translated into English.

   Pahor's experience was in Natzweiler -- and later in Dachau. He tells the
   grisly tale of how Italy persecuted the speakers of Slovenian and
   Serbo-Croatian in the areas it annaxed after World War I and expanded into after the outbreak of World War II. For Pahor, a Triestino Jew barred from speaking his own language and whose main memories are of gravestones on which the names were italianized and of the main Slovenian library in Trieste being burned to the ground by blackshirted fascists, Natzweiler (he does not explain why he ended in that camp high in the Vosges mountains of France) proved that the ties among "Yugoslavs" were strong despite the signs of breakup after the death of Tito.

   This is a literary memoir -- awfully hard to read with constant flashbacks
   from present to past and back again -- that does flesh out some horrors.
   For example, the hot water in the showers at Natzweiler came from boilers placed above the crematorium ovens (something I did not find in
   Buchenwald).

   Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

5 comments about A Jump for Life: A Survivor's Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland.

1. 
   Originally written in 1946, Cyprys' account is remarkably free of the Judeocentric, German-whitewashing, anti-Christian, and anti-Polish tendencies of today. She devotes almost as much attention to German crimes against Poles as to those against Jews. Furthermore, Cyprys makes it clear that the Germans regarded the Poles as having no more inherent right to live than the Jews. Consider what happened when two Poles were mistakenly herded with Jews into a Treblinka-bound train: "Two gentiles in our wagon tried to explain to the Germans that they did not fit into this society and tried to show their documents. All to no avail. `Even if you are not a Jew, you are a damned Pole', yelled the German, and slapped the older woman's face, barking `Polish swine' and with his rifle butt drove her to the wagon." (p. 95).
   
   Cyprys reported a balanced range of Polish attitudes towards Jews (pp. 118-119, 127, 132), some of which varied within the same family (pp. 142-143). Ironically, she was helped by the obsessively anti-Semitic Mrs. Zosia, who felt sorry for the Jews and who aided them (pp. 220-221).
   
   In his FEAR, Jan Tomasz Gross presents a distorted view of Poles acquiring Jewish properties during the German occupation. In contrast, when mentioning how some Poles pretended to be Volksdeutsche in order to join in the German-sponsored pillage of Jewish properties, she nevertheless added: "The local mob usually guided the Germans to the rich Jewish houses and stores. With the deepest shame I must admit that there were some Jews among the scum." (pp. 25-26).
   
   One inflammatory Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about Jews, while being transported to the death camps and with full knowledge of their impending deaths, being forced to endure the sight of indifferent or gleeful Polish onlookers. Against such nonsense, we learn that the death trains had small, barred windows well above eye level, and with nothing to stand on in order to look out of them (p. 96). Viewing (in either direction) was nearly impossible. The author and her daughter were loaded on a Treblinka-bound train. It was only with the greatest difficulty that Cyprys was boosted up and enabled to cut through the bars to jump out and to have her daughter Eva (Ewa) get pushed out.
   
   The oft-quoted Polish remarks about Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising "getting burned like bugs", although invariably presented as such, wasn't necessarily derogatory. After all, Poles used the same phrase to refer to themselves in the face of their defenselessness against German incendiary bombing during the Warsaw Uprising! (p. 200).
   
   The Germans strongly promoted alcoholism among Poles. This was done in order to degrade them (Lemkin elaborated on this) and to exploit this dependency as leverage in the denunciation of fugitive Jews (p. 174).
   
   Cyprys elaborates on the semi-collaborationist Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa): "There were policemen who would accept neither bribes nor ransoms but, for the sake of their ideology, would hand over the Jews. Looking at this group objectively, however, one has to say that among their ranks there were many Volksdeutsch volunteers. The activities of the Polish police aroused such hostility among the majority of the Polish people, that death sentences were passed on several policemen by the Polish underground organizations and executions were carried out by Polish lads...upon the orders of the Organization a detailed list of all policemen was kept in the Underground offices. These contained, apart from proved misconduct, evidence of their standard of living which ascertained whether a dark blue was profiteering from blackmail or extortion. These lists of evidence were kept till the Warsaw Uprising: I do not know whether they survived the insurrection." (p. 138).
   
   However, by no stretch of the imagination was the Polish Blue Police the main force in the roundups of Jews for their deaths: "On about 5 August [1942] all `workshop territories' were hermetically closed and the Germans and Ukrainians started a ruthless expulsion of anyone found outside these areas--always with the efficient help of the Jewish militia. Wherever a German or a Ukrainian did not venture the militia men would gladly fish out as many as possible of those still hidden in cellars and vaults, only to oblige the Germans." (p. 52).
   
   Most Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniki), "the scum of mankind" (p. 119), took only part of the belongings of their Jewish victims and didn't usually actually denounce Jews to the Germans (pp. 119-120). They sometimes excused their conduct by their poverty and even gave the Jews advice on how better to disguise their Jewishness (p. 140).
   
   Underworld Poles weren't the only ones that fugitive Jews feared: "The Jewish Gestapo men who remained alive were very dangerous. Their eyes were penetrating and Jews pointed out by them were lost beyond hope." (p. 165). Cyprys personally observed them shouting Jewish slogans or singing Jewish songs in order to provoke a telltale reaction in fugitive Jews among the pedestrians (pp. 165-166).
   
   Cyprys alludes to Zegota as follows: "It goes without saying that only a fraction of the Jews in hiding knew about the existence of this committee. Those who were in touch with the patriotic `Polish intelligentsia' or people who worked in the Underground were most likely to benefit. Everything was obviously carried out in the greatest secrecy, using all available means of security." (p. 150). Complaints about Zegota aiding only a modest number of Jews are clearly off the mark.
   
   In fact, Cyprys has a very sage understanding of ALL underground activities: "In reality underground activities were extremely stressful and required a great deal of steadiness and concentration. And because it had gone on for so many years, it was exhausting even to the strongest individuals and led to many casualties." (p. 184).
   
   Cyprys provides a level of detail about the Warsaw Uprising usually done by Polish authors. We read, for instance, about the devastating effects of the German nebelwerfer ("roaring cow" or "cupboard"), and the systematic destruction of Warsaw by Germans AFTER the Uprising.



2. It is ironic that the author of this amazing journal never saw her work published, instead it was her two daughters who published it after her death. It is a gripping read,and recounts how the author escapes a death train heading to Treblinka by sawing off the bars on the window of the train and jumping out of it into the wilderness, together with her 2 yr old daughter! It is so much more than an account of survival, it gives one pause for thought as to what one would do given similar circumstances...I myself am mother to a toddler, and reading this just made me feel connected to the author, in that I too would do anything for my child, but do I possess the same courage as Ruth? It's impossible to imagine her life in occupied Poland, trying to live on the Aryan side, amongst Gentiles, keeping her daughter amongst strangers, not knowing if she will be saved...this is an amazing account of a woman's courage, a mother's love, and undying faith.



3. I read this book about 6 years ago, in a period when I read every Holocaust testimony I could lay my hands on, to help me understand the first hand testimony I, alone, had received from a lifelong friend who herself survived the Vilna ghetto, and three concentration camps.
   
   As Cat R reports, the author's daughter found her mother's manuscript in 1979, after the former had died. The text gives a very personal account of the Nazi invasion of Poland, this one from the perspective of a Warsaw native shipped with her small daughter, in January 1943, aboard a cattle car from the ghetto, bound to a certain death at Treblinka.
   
   Certain except that she fought back. She knew from rumors what happened there. With a hacksaw blade she had concealed, she determined to saw through the bars of one of two small windows in her car, and reached them from the shoulders of two strong young boys willing to help her.
   
   To ensure that the boys threw her daughter out the window after she had jumped, Eva gave a bag of chocolate, sugar and bread to a sympathetic friend too old to join her, and asked her to ensure they got it if they did as she had asked.
   
   The jump was but the beginning of one Jewish mother's perilous and somehow miraculous bid to survive--with her child.
   
   In the end, this sufferings of this mother and child were far less severe than those of my friend Masha. Nevertheless, this is a gripping, and important account, not to be missed.
   
   --Alyssa A. Lappen



4. This wartime memoir was discovered by the author's daughter in 1979, following her mother's death. It relates the events of the Nazi persecution in Poland, the suffering and degradation of the Warsaw Ghetto ... and an extraordinary courage and will to survive. Realizing the fate in store for her, Ruth made plans for escape. In the winter of 1943, she and two-year-old Eva were rounded up and crowded into a cattle-car for the fatal journey to Treblinka. A single chance for life remained to them: a perilous jump from the moving train. Their first night of freedom was spent huddling together in a freezing, abandoned dog-kennel, with Ruth licking her daughter's wounds. In their danger-fraught flight for survival, they encountered kind-hearted Catholics who risked their lives to aid a Jewish mother and child. This book is a powerful first-hand account of terrifying times, and a testimony to a mother's courage.



5. This would have to be one of the few diaries that tells the story of the horror of the Holocaust. Ruth lives through many tough situations, where her quick thinking saves her and her daughter Eva. It paints a clear picture of how people in Warsaw were treated, and how the Germans got rid of the Jews in the Ghetto and in Warsaw. It is rather sad, but it is true. If you read this story, you will learn first hand about the life that Jews lived in the Holocaust. I suggest reading it!

5 comments about The Strange Death of Heinrich Himmler: A Forensic Investigation.

1. This book presents a compelling argument to suggest that Heinrich Himmler did not, in fact, commit suicide in the hands of the allies.
   
   The author, while questioning the official story of Himmler's death, is unable to form any conclusions regarding Himmler's fate because much of the evidence is either under seal until 2045, or 1945. However, the author does more than enough to bring into doubt the old, tired story about Himmler's fate.



2. One thing is for certain, Himmler is a man of multiple contradictions and this is one of the first books to show that. The more that comes out of the archives as time passes shows a man who was not dull or stupid, riding up on Reinhard Heydrich's coattails; but a man who had amazing cunning and a remarkable sense of self preservation. Perhaps he did snap at the end of the war and foolishly walked into British hands and say 'Here I am', but I have always found that rather hard to believe. I found Thomas's arguements and research interesting; I don't know if I believe all of it, but I think it's about time someone questioned what happened at Himmlers suicide.



3. I received the "Himmler conspiracy" book as a gift and struggled through most of it; my only surprise was that it is even worse than I had imagined. The book is poor research, poor forensic science, and not even very good conspiracy pulp.

   There are numerous sources on Himmler's death that the author has failed to mention, obviating the troublesome necessity of refuting them. Even a cursory glance at the debriefings of Himmler's SS assistants who were with him shortly before his arrest, for example, attest to his intent to take his own life if made prisoner. The author similarly ignores myriad statements from British and German individuals, military and civilian, who were present at the various stages of Himmler's arrest, suicide, and eventual internment.

   Beyond the weak "research"-- much of it apparently relying on translations rather than primary source materials since the author does not read German (?)-- is the central question of motivation.

   Why would the British or the Allies acquiesce in such a ruse? To avoid embarassment at having "negotiated" with Himmler during the war's final stages? Rubbish! The Western Allies used plenty of ex-Nazis to counter the Soviet threat, from the technicians of Werner von Braum's shop to intelligence assets like Himmler's erstwhile svengali Walter Schellenberg. Some of these associations were unsavory, but neither London nor Washington has ever been overly reluctant to acknowledge them given the uncertain and dangerous period in which they were forged.

   Himmler had nothing to offer the Allies after the war. He would have been far more useful in the prisoner's dock at Nuremburg than as an intelligence asset. And to suggest that Himmler took up captaincy of an Odessa-like werewolf organization pushes the bounds of credulity to the limit.

   For readers interested in leading Third Reich personalities who did escape justice and went on to lead interesting and unusual lives, try bios of Josef Mengele, Adolf Galland, Otto Skorzeny, or maybe the Flemish Nazi leader, Leon de Grelle. But as for Himmler-- not really the most interesting Nazi in any case-- leave the conspiracy theories well enough alone!




4. At least the first 25 or 30 pages of this book are spent 'examining' the personality of Heinrich Himmler.
   The author offers no new insights into the Reichsfuhrer, he falls back on old suppositions and translations of books. Most notably he relies on the translations of Himmler's diaries. Personally, I have no respect for a 'serious' researcher who likes to state as fact something that he hasn't translated for himself.

   His portrait of Himmler's personality is the same old 'brilliantly scheming monster' that we've all seen before. It is dull and uninteresting, and falls back on old legends and anecdotes about Himmler without really touching on what kind of person he may have been. Granted, this isn't a biography, but still, a more objective presentation might have been a reasonable alternative.

   My biggest problem, though (and this is with just the first 30 pages) is the fact that the author basically shoots himself in the foot right from the start. He runs hot and cold between Himmler being not especially intelligent, then decides that the man WAS intelligent, then goes back and decides that he wasn't, and so forth.

   Clearly Himmler was an organizational genius, but if the author isn't willing to give Himmler credit for being at least semi-bright, how in the world does he expect the reader to believe the level of quick thinking and long-term planning that he goes on to describe?

   Beyond that, for a forensic expert, the author certainly has some antiquated ideas of post-mortem physiological happenings. I was initially very excited to pick up this book, but I lost my appetite before I even hit a double-digit page number, and was ready to throw the book into the street before I hit a three-digit page number.

   Ultimately, the reader will have to decide for his or herself whether or not the book is good, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're very, very bored and are ready to have to swallow poor writing and research and half-baked theories and evidence.




5. Regardless of speculation based on such circumstantial material as whether hair grows or not after death or what eyeglasses Himmler preferred, Thomas' theory that the No. 2 Nazi survived the war comes down to one question: whose body did British Intelligence conceal in an unmarked grave in May 1945? According to the author, the dental assistant who worked on Himmler until November 1944 did not recognize the teeth shown in the British autopsy report as belonging to the suicide identified as Himmler. The author presents a convincing case that the SS Reichsfuhrer was no suicide. If so, this book --- which shows the Nazis had business dealings with British & American intelligence agencies, US-based multinational corporations and European aristocracy that amounted to treason --- may prove of particular interest to conspiracy "buffs" who see disturbing parallels, if not outright linkage, between the rise of fascism in Germany and America under the "neo-cons."

1 comments about Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs.

1. Fanya Gottesfeld-Heller recounts her girlhood years as a Jew during World War II, spent in increasing poverty and restriction and in the midst of horrid cruelties. Born in the shetl of Skala in Poland, in what is now Ukrania, Mrs. Heller was 15 when, in the middle of the night, the Germans arrived to round up the town's Jews. Any Jews captured were herded out of the town, forced to dig their own graves, and shot--among them, Mrs. Heller's grandparents. Her grandfather, first one in the family captured by the Germans, led them to the hiding place of his wife, among others, in the hope of saving his own life, but was forced to watch their deaths and then killed. Mrs. Heller survived because her adored father had constructed a hideaway for their large family. But that night began four years of increasing privation: near-starvation, the desperate search for someplace to hide or someone to hide them, loss of family members, grotesque cruelties by the villagers. Mrs. Heller's admirer, Jan, a Gentile carpenter, first hid her at his house, then arranged with a former employee of Mr. Gottesfeld for the immediate family of four to be hidden at a farm. Their food and their accomodations became increasingly restricted, until they spent several months in a space behind the chicken coop, so small that if one moved, all had to move; they starved, lying in their feces and covered with lice. Mrs. Heller also recounts the story of her developing love for Jan, and the strange turns that war brought to that love. Mrs. Heller writes beautifully. The engrossing story moves quickly, but retains the details and descriptions that vividly portray the shtetl, her family and their saviors, and the extreme privations they suffered. She is unstinting in her portrayals of wartime, telling us the worst as well as the best; but all of it in a matter-of-fact way. It was a privilege to read this book and spend a little time with this remarkable woman.

5 comments about My Future is in America: Autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish Immigrants.

1. I was assigned this book for a Jewish History class at my university, and so far I'm really enjoying it. We read one of the autobiographies each week, and I feel that Cohen has done an excellent job of bringing together stories from different backgrounds and different experiences, and even has a married couple each tell their stories in their own autobiographies.
   
   I'll be honest; I was expecting it to be boring - but am very pleasantly surprised to find that it's not!



2. The older brother of Minnie Goldstein, who wrote the first of the autobiographies that appear in the book, is my great-grandfather and what seems to have been passed down through the generations is a somewhat sanitised version of the truth ... I really had no idea about their dreadful poverty, or the fact that a contributing factor to Hershl Malinberg's emigration from Warsaw to the U.S. was being cheated in business by his own mother-in-law. Of course, the story has particular resonance for her own kith and kin, but it contains so much vivid detail, and is told so well, that I would recommend it to anyone.



3. "My Future Is In America" contains excellent primary source material for the student of Jewish immigration to this country and immigration history in general. The individual essays are captivating and very readable, providing a wealth of information about the immigrant experience, not only after arrival in America, but also about life in Europe pre-immigration. This book should be considered as reading in American Studies curricula.



4. I just finished reading this book. This is not only for Jewish people but other religions as well. It's a part of our history and I found it very enjoyable and informative. A must read.



5. 
   As a first generation American, I always wanted to know how and why my parents came to America... they passed away before imparting this information.... this book fills in all the gaps, in a humorous and interesting way. I could not put this book down, and reread it... Totally enjoyable!!!! 5 stars

2 comments about The Seventh Miracle.

1. I receive many books for review; thus, when I opened Jorge Klainman's The Seventh Miracle I planned to skim through it, but I couldn't;it grabbed me from the start...Klainman relates this tale of horror like a born storyteller; he writes with the great economy and simplicity of on who has lived it, which creates in the reader a high degree of empathy...His story is both heroic and sad, and yet (I can't believe that I am writing this) it also has moments of humor. The saddest part of this incredible story is that his brother Moniek, who had managed to survive the Holocaust, should die shortly afterwards from complications of appendicitis, before Klainman could be reunited with him. Highly recommended reading, gripping, breathtaking until the very end. -- Mario Wainstain, Aurora Weekly, Tel Aviv.



2. It is with deep emotion that I read The Seventh Miracle. To think that a young boy, bereaved of all his family, had to experience what he did; to know that he did not share his horrible experiences with his family or friends for decades--so deeply were they engraved in him; and to understand that they burst out with full force after having spent 50 years in Argentina--this is what the reader of this unique book is requested to do. He has undergone such tortures, physically and emotionally; he spent his boyhood in ghettos and camps--and still he remained an optimist, a man of values and hope. I believe the book should reach a many hands as possible, in order to spread this story of the triumph of the Jewish spirit-- ....

No comments about A Pictorial History of Adolf Hitler (Pictorial History).