1 comments about Never Despair: Sixty Years in the Service of the Jewish People and of Human Rights.

1. In 194 a counsel in the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress sent the first notice of the 'Final Solution' affecting Jewish peoples in Europe - it was known as the Riegner Telegram and while it was a pivotal point in his career, it by far wasn't the only memorable point in his life. This biography surveys the life of a middle-class Jewish family in Germany and tells how Riegner fled Hitler's rise and worked for the World Jewish Congress all his life thereafter, sponsoring many key programs. Any interested in Jewish history in general will find NEVER DESPAIR: SIXTY YEARS IN THE SERVICE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE NAD THE CAUSE OF HUMAN RIGHTS to be essential reading.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch

1 comments about To Tell at Last: Survival Under False Identity, 1941-45.

1. Blanca Rosenberg's story tells a remarkable (and often improbably lucky) story of a young woman, newly married, with a small child, who manages to survive through a series of hair-raising adventures as a disguised Aryan in wartime Poland. She loses the child, while still in the ghetto, but thereafter, she escapes and eventually ends up as the head housekeeper for a highly placed German officer in Warsaw. She saves her best friend too, who unlike Blanca, cannot pass so easily, and in the process, discovers that a number of the officer's staff are also Jews in hiding. She does her job so well that she is sent to Heidelberg to another family, where she ultimately survives the horrors of the end of the war in Germany. There is a wonderful love story at the end, once again beyond ordinary expectations, and having emigrated to this country, she becomes a distinguished Professor of Social Work at Columbia University. I knew Blanca personally -- and even at the age of 85, she has lost none of her unforgettable qualities. Well written and full of suspense, this memoir stands out from a host of others by the eventful series of circumstances, the resourcefulness of the author, and above all, the combination of sheer luck and personal ingenuity.

5 comments about Lightning and Ashes.

1. Funneled from the cries both silent and aloud of the thousands, the millions who were the holocaust... these voices rise and call to us, "Remember, remember -- never forget!"
   
   How this poet, removed from the actual experiences, yet bound by blood, could ever convey with such simplicity (artfully) this undeniable horror of life gone impossibly wrong is a wondrous feat. A mark to be seared permanently into the social consciousness, and never erased from history.
   
   Again, and again, one asks: "How could this be? Or have ever been?" We, whose lives are blessed with food and shelter, endless comforts of tv and personal vehicles plush as small houses on wheels, with a forever plethora of non-stop music, and wondering what to buy at the mall -- oh, how spoiled we are!! And yet, we too, carry in us similar hearts as of the enemy... waiting perhaps to erupt, flare up again... at what instigation? It is simple: what was done was human against human. The grief only waiting to reappear in the future; though I pray never to see it.
   
   This book, this reminder, this poet. Not to be forgotten easily. These memories cloaked forever in pain, "and how pain is like the night that never seems to end."
   
   We must make note. Weep with them.
   Promise... never again.
   
   (Buy this. And pass it on.)



2. I read John Guzlowski's collection The Language of Mules a couple of years ago and was very pleased to find this collection. He is a very talented poet who should be more widely read and appreciated. The Language of Mules explores the experiences of his parents in the Nazi camps during WWII, a theme which Lightning and Ashes continues to explore, and also his family's experiences on first arrving in America. The images can be stark and dreadful - they are also unforgettable - but there is a lyricism and beauty that makes these multi-stranded in their depiction of this world.
   Just to give a flavour of the writing - an extract from I Dream of My father as He Was When He First Came Here Looking For Work:
   'Remember this: this is what war is./One man has a chicken and another doesn't/One man is hungry and another isn't/One man is alive and another is dead./Isay, there must be more, and he says/"No that's all there is. Everything else/is the fancy clothes they put on the corpse.



3. Lightning And Ashes is not an easy book. Like "lightning," it lights up the sky in shocking flashes. Where it lands it may burn what it strikes, leaving ashes in its wake. Death by war, torture, famine, depression: these are the topics relentlessly faced by the author, himself tragically familiar with these experiences through his parents' survival in World War II. In the opening poem, his mother says "Even though you're a grown man/and a teacher, we saw things/I don't want to tell you about." Well, this poet wants to tell you about them. It's worth listening.



4. 
   One critic dubbed Guzlowski as one of the "great recording angels" of
   our age. This is apt praise for a true poet whose words are simple,
   straightforward, and sing with raw power. Guzlowski's parents met in
   Hitler's labor camps and survived to build a life out of "lightning
   and ashes." This book is his testament to them.
   
   In the prologue poem, "My Mother Reads My Poem 'Cattle Train to
   Magdeburg'" the poet's mother shares a few of her memories, but only a
   few:
   
   Even though you're a grown man
   and a teacher, we saw things
   I don't want to tell you about.
   
   Guzlowski describes his mother as "the poet of dead ends, old despairs/written in whispers..." His father is "a man held together/with stitches he laced himself."
   
   This is a masterful work, poignant and beautiful. Highly recommended.



5. John Guzlowski's "Lightning and Ashes" is an important and beautiful book that should be widely read.
   
   Guzlowski's Polish-Catholic parents were victimized by the Nazis. His father, an orphan farm worker, became a slave laborer in the Buchenwald Concentration District. His mother, the child of a forest ranger, was also pressed into slave labor. Guzlowski himself was born as a Displaced Person after WW II. Eventually, his family made their way to the United States, where Guzlowski became a professor and poet.
   
   Fans of good writing and, indeed, anyone who has ever looked at his or her parents or grandparents and thought, "What were their lives like before I was born? What are they thinking about when they get that faraway look in their eyes?" will find much to love in this book.
   
   I didn't finish this book feeling as if I'd read yet another history of the Holocaust. I finished this book feeling as if I'd read a book about family, and about love, about the mysteries of the parent-child relationship, and, indeed, about the mysteries of the child-sibling-parent relationship.
   
   Guzlowski's poems about his witnessing his mother's abuse of his sister, and his pleading with his sister not to cry, transcend any given time or place. These are poems about family, and accurate, intimate snapshots of families under exceptional stress -- in this case, the stress of post-World War Two readjustment -- provide uniquely valuable insight into our own families.
   
   Guzlowski's poetry is easy to read. This is not the kind of poetry that requires its reader to have an advanced degree in obscure terminology to understand. Guzlowski uses vocabulary that a peasant or worker would use to name the items in his world: a chicken, a stove, a club, blood. Guzlowski's sentence structure is basic, as the examples, below, show:
   
   "These men belonged to the Germans
   the way a mule belonged to the Germans."
   
   "We soldiers are only human. We love
   to kill. It is the hidden God in each of us."
   
   "Dear Baby Jesus,
   If You have any pity left
   bestow it, please, on my wife.
   She suffers from the war.
   
   You know about her mother,
   and her sister and the baby,
   and the things
   she's told no one."
   
   Guzlowski's basic vocabulary and sentence structure reflect how aged peasants often talk. In this aesthetic choice, Guzlowski honors his parents. He communicates to us, his readers, that the language of peasants is good enough to communicate big, hard ideas and feelings.
   
   Guzlowski's basic words and sentences also reflect how American children hear their immigrant parents, who communicating across gulfs of language and experience, must revert to the lowest common denominators of speech.
   
   Guzlowski's basic language also reflects attempts at understanding by those of us who did not live through WW II or the Holocaust. Big words and complex sentences give way; what we hear and remember are images, for example, a girl discovering a sister's body parts sliced off and left lying in the dirt beside her corpse.
   
   Again, simple language. No attempts to sensationalize or sentimentalize.
   
   Guzlowski's "Lightning and Ashes" is among the best writing out there that attempts to come to terms with the hardest events of recent history. That's reason enough to read it.
   
   There are other reasons to purchase and read this book, though. The experience of Polish Catholics under the Nazis during World War Two has been distorted beyond recognition in recent "historical" texts that have sold outlandish numbers of copies and received the kind of press attention usually devoted to dysfunctional starlets. Guzlowski's slender volume of poems stands as corrective to those powerful, popular lies.
   
   There will be some measure of justice for the maligned dead when books like "Lightning and Ashes" receive as much attention as those other books whose titles I won't mention here.
   
   These dead are very patient in their wait for justice.
   
   Just ... buy and read this book. And pass it on.

No comments about Job: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor.

5 comments about Ruined by the Reich: Memoir of an East Prussian Family, 1916-1945.

1. For an autobiography, constrained to stick to what actually happened or was lived, the second world war is as dramatic a context as you can get. I have little previous exposure to books about personal experiences of the second world war, but I think what sets this book apart is the slowness & indirectness of experiencing the war & the inevitable & visceral destruction it brings.
   
   Brandenburg tells a very involved & nuanced story without ever bordering on the dramatic. She shows remarkable poise & a wonderful eye for detail without losing herself in any kind of literary embellishments. She tells the story of growing up with a lovely peasant family in East Prussia, its hard life demanding discipline, the Germans trading freedom for security post first world war, Hitler's deep penetration into the social & psychological realms of Germany, the initial victories, the never-ending war with Russia, the eventual retreats, & the German defeat.
   
   In between all this are woven tales of growing up, marriages, jealousies, betrayals, cowardice, fear & suspense. And inevitably, there is death. Yes, there is hope at the end, & yes, there is rejuvenation. But those remain very lame consolations for what is lost, for what is learned, & for what is lived.
   
   Perhaps, if Brandenburg had experienced the war as an adult, there might have been more complex experiences & analysis; however, this book remains ultimately about what is lost.
   
   S!



2. The beauty of this story is in the details. What was eaten for breakfast; her first doll; the logistics of evacuating - of loading your possessions and food onto a wagon hitched to a horse in the days before refrigeration and styrofoam coolers. Yes, this story is a tragedy, be prepared to have your heartstrings pulled but intermingled are the happy events such as finding an abandoned cow, hiding it and tasting milk again.The characters are real and the reader cannot help himself from empathizing with the whole village.



3. After reading Ruined by the Reich it brought to light that everyone suffers during and after war. Unfortunately, to this point, the view of Germans has always been that the whole population were Nazis. From this book we realize that such is not the case and that Germans also encountered horrible and unspeakable acts of terror in their own country. It's important to understand that there are two sides to every story and thanks to the vivid recount by Dan Laing and the strength of Christel Weiss Brandeburg we are presented with the entire picture.



4. I recently finished the book Ruined by the Reich. Its a compelling story of a firsthand account of a families anguish. When Christel speaks of her harrowing ordeals you can visualize everything that she is going through. A detailed outlook of the effects of war on all individuals involved.I would love to see this book made into a movie. Dan Laing is an excellent writer and Christel Weiss is a wonderful story teller.



5. I JUST FINISHED READING, RUINED BY THE REICH. THIS WAS
   A FASCINATING STORY, AND YET VERY SAD. I DON'T THINK
   MOST OF US EVER THOUGHT ABOUT THE GERMAN PEOPLE SUFFERING.
   THAT POOR GIRL. THE WRITING WAS SO DISTINCT, I FELT IT
   WHEN CHRISTEL WAS COLD AND I FELT STARVED WHEN SHE DIDN'T
   GET ENOUGH TO EAT. POOR CHRISTEL IS IN OUR PRAYERS.

   I HOPE THESE TWO WHO HAVE COLLABORATED SO WELL, ARE
   WORKING ON A SCREEN PLAY.

   THIS WAS SO VERY WELL TOLD. POOR CRYSTEL IS IN OUR PRAYERS.

3 comments about Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna.

1. Australian philosopher Peter Singer, now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has written a thoughtful, well-researched portrait of his grandfather, David Oppenheim, who perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. "We all know that six million Jews died," writes Singer in the Prologue, "but that is a mind-numbing statistic. I have a chance to portray one of them as an individual."

   His grandfather was a classical scholar in Vienna, a teacher of Greek and Latin at a prestigious gymnasium (high school), and an active participant in the city's psychoanalytic circles as a collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and a friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, the first of Freud's colleagues to defect from his inner circle over basic disagreements about psychoanalytic theory.
   
   Oppenheim's wife, Amalie (a math and physics scholar in her own right) was also sent to Theresienstadt, but she survived, the only one of Singer's four grandparents to do so. She moved to Australia in 1946, the year Singer was born, and lived with his family for nine years until her death in 1955. Singer went on to study philosophy at Oxford and teach at Monash University in Australia, but always in the background there was a cloud of sadness and silence that hung over his family's recent past. (On his mother's side he comes from a long line of rabbis stretching back to the seventeenth century.)

   His aunt's master's thesis about her father inspired Singer to learn more about his grandfather and write this book. He collected his grandfather's personal papers, letters between his grandparents before their marriage that he retrieved from his aunt's attic, and letters his grandparents wrote to his parents and aunt after they emigrated to Australia in 1938. Singer also travelled to Vienna to see where his grandparents lived and visit the school where his grandfather taught. He searched for additional pertinent information in the Austrian archives, interviewed his grandfather's surviving students, and went to Theresienstadt to see for himself where his grandfather died. Singer believed that reading through his grandfather's vast collection of writings in German, most of them in longhand that was difficult to read, would be "to undo, in some infinitely small but still quite palpable way, a wrong done by the Holocaust."

   The final part of the book describes the departure of the children to Australia in 1938 after the Anschluss, the illusory hope that life would somehow go on, the desperate efforts from faraway Melbourne to save the parents from the impeding catastrophe, and finally Theresienstadt. During his research Singer also learned what happened to his paternal grandparents: the Germans transported them to Lodz in Poland (after that they were probably gassed at Chelmno).

   Professor Singer's well-crafted tribute to his grandfather and the lost world of Jewish Vienna is a valuable contribution to Holocaust remembrance and mourning.

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




2. An excellent and important story that needs to be told over and over again. But for those of us who use non-fiction books such as this for research as well, this book lacks a crucial element--an index. I could not recommend this book to someone researching information on the Holocaust because there is no way for someone to retrieve important information without laboriously searching page by page through the book. When will publishers learn what researchers and librarians know, a non-fiction book without an index is not complete?



3. This is a compelling and frequently moving account of the author's grandparents' lives from the turn of the century in Vienna to the middle years of the twentieth century. The grandparents, David and Amalie Oppenheim, had both the good and bad fortune to live through some of the most interesting and tragic times of the last century. As young, educated, middle-class Jews living in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, they experienced the last days of the Hapsburg empire, the intellectual currents of the time and place (including being part of Freud's circle), the first world war, the depression, anti-semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as the great intellectual achievements of Austro-German culture.

   The book is a fascinating account of the period, as well as the curious relationship between David and Amalie, whose homosexual feelings towards others seem to lead them into marriage and children of their own. The final chapters, describing post-Anschluss Vienna, the ghetto conditions in which they were forced to live, and finally Theresienstadt concentration camp are harrowing and moving. As a memoir rather than a history, the book is written well and reads easily; though there are references to other works, it is not in any way dull or academic. The author's frequent comparisons between his grandfather's way of thinking and his own are I feel a little forced, but this is only a minor quibble, especially when the humanity of both the author and the grandparents about whom he is writing is evident. Highly recommended.

   One book which Singer refers to frequently is Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", which I would also highly recommend to anyone interested in the period or subject matter.

No comments about Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust a Memoir.

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 The End of Days: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust Series).

1. Helen Sendyk was a Jew who lived in Chrzanow, Poland, before WWII. She describes Jewish life in pre-WWII Poland, the German invasion, the horrors of the German occupation, life at a German labor camp at Reichenbach (present-day Dzierzionow) in Silesia, "liberation" by the Soviets, etc.
   
   Before the war, Poland's Jews enjoyed an economic hegemony which the Poles attempted to weaken or break through boycotts. On one hand, the hegemony had tended to be self-perpetuating, because of the following: "Jewish families in Chrzanow knew each other for generations. Traditions and family status, yichus, were very important, and children generally followed in their parents' footsteps. An official, respectful distance was kept between Jews and gentiles, but the Staplers had an unusually close relationship with our non-Jewish patrons." (p. 3). On the other hand, the boycott was far from universal. Her Uncle Pinchas regularly sold shoes to Poles (p. 50).
   
   Sendyk's description of the German conquest of Poland includes that of a dogfight between the Polish Air Force and the Luftwaffe. Occurring on Sept. 3 (p. 57), the Polish airmen emerged victorious in this particular encounter: "When the buzzing intensified, we looked up to see a German airplane. Huddling together, we awaited the impending disaster. But the bombs never came. Instead, we saw five Polish planes in pursuit of the enemy plane. A short battle ensued, and soon the German craft burst into a ball of flames, burning shreds falling like fiery torches to the ground. There was exhilaration and happy waving at the Polish planes, with some people applauding the Polish heroes who had just saved their lives." (p. 60). Her testimony adds refutation to the canard about the Polish Air Force getting destroyed on the ground on the first day of the war.
   
   The Judenrat and Jewish police are described in nuanced terms. Some of them tried to ease the plight of their brethren, while others eagerly collaborated with the Germans for personal gain (p. 137).
   
   It is well known that the Soviets raped German women and girls in their drive across German-held or German territory. What is less known is the fact that the Soviets did the same to Polish women and girls, and to females of other nationalities. When the Red Army liberated the camp in which Sendyk had been held, the soldiers later returned, forcefully and persistently contending that they were owed sexual favors for liberating the Jewish women (pp. 216-218, 224). Other females in the area were raped.



2. My name is Max Stappler however my parents, Edith and Siegfried, born in Austria changed the spelling from Stapler. My parents were able to escape Austria to the USA a few days after Hitler marched in. This is the story of the rest of my family from Poland who were not lucky enough to escape.



3. 
   In the book The End of Days, by Helen Sendyk is telling her life story of when she was a young Jewish girl. She wrote the novel in first person so it was like she was telling her life story to me. The choice of words she used in the novel were very descriptive and explained very clearly how it was. She moved the book along at a pretty fast paste which I really liked. I could imagine everything that was happening in my head as if it were a movie.
   The theme in the novel is her telling the struggles she went through in her life. She was a young Jewish girl when her and her family were put in a concentration camp. The novel explained some of the horrible things she went through in the camp and the many family members she lost. The part of the novel that had really saddened me was the fight after the camp to stay sane. I would recommend this book to anyone. This book will change the way you treat different people and how your actions can affect people. I was amazed what happened to this poor girl and who ever reads this will be also.



4. Six million dead is hard to bend your mind around. This small book gives part of the experiences of one family and ultimately one survivor. If you have a hard time grasping the enormity of the Holocaust read this book. It is raw, open and honest. It is one person's experience of the monstrosity of the Third Reich. Sendyk tells her story from the perspective of a young girl and with the wisdom of a mature woman. Three from a family of ten survived. Many more from their extended family were killed. If you are studying the holocaust, read this book. It puts a human face on Six Million.



5. The End Of Days: A Memoir Of The Holocaust is the personal memoir of Helen Sendyk, one of very few Jewish women to survive the living hell of a German slave labor camp during the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. A personal, eye-witness testimony to brutal and horrific inhumanity inflicted upon the women by their Nazi captors and collaborators, as well as a testament the enduring strength of Helen Sendyk's inner qualities that enabled her to survive when so many others could not, The End Of Days is a moving account and a very highly recommended contribution to Holocaust Studies reading lists and reference collections -- especially in view of the pernicious attempts in some quarters to deny the appalling atrocities of the "Final Solution".

No comments about Guess Who's Jewish? (You'll Never Guess).