5 comments about I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years.

1. One should read this book only after the first volume covering the years 1933-41. The story of Victor & Eva's survival of detention in the Jews' house, the Dresden bombing and subsequent wanderings stunned me. But Victor's courage in continuing his secret diary for 12 years comes through - as does his humanity ad personal growth.
   
   The diary jotting sryle means you pick it up and read a section at a time, but you will most likely be drawn into finishing it within a short time.



2. And I will get the other years of this author's diary. This is not a fast paced WWII battle book; this is the diary of a poor soul who had to live through every moment of a terrible regime, to endure even more when he thought he'd reached his limit. If you're interested in what it was like to live day to day in Hitler's Germany (as a Jew or a gentile)--to understand what it was like to watch it begin and grow and eventually implode--this is an excellent read. I would say it is for those deeply interested in the psychology of the times; not a passing interest. I'll get the other books and read them in order of the years they cover. I really want to understand how the Third Reich could ever BE.



3. This is actually the second volume of Klemperer's diaries, published in two volumes. I highly recommend that you buy both volumes as a set and read from the beginning how a bureaucratic mindset advanced towards ultimate evil.
   
   In the end, Klemperer's diary doesn't fully answer the haunting question, "How could it have happened?" But you will find some definitive answers here to questions that Holocaust scholars have debated over the years.
   
   For example, Klemperer's experience answers the charge that virtually all Aryan Germans knew from the beginning exactly what the Third Reich's intentions were towards the Jews. Klemperer's actual interactions stand as refutation of this blanket indictment. Often when he visited Aryan acquaintances to conduct business - he would then jovially be invited to come back that evening for schnapps. Klemperer had to explain that he couldn't come back later for schnapps - that as a Jew, he was prohibited from boarding any vehicle of public transportation after 6:00 PM, that he had a general curfew, and that of course, he had long since been banned from owning his own car.
   
   Klemperer was always circumspect in recounting these laws he labored under to his "Semitophile" acquaintances. (That's an awkward translation of the German phrase Klemperer probably used to refer to Aryans who were sympathetic to Jews. But it is perhaps the only word that was available to Martin Chalmers, who otherwise has produced a generally fluid translation of Klemperer's journals.) At any rate, Klemperer was careful never to appear too whining or too critical of the restrictions placed on him. He didn't want to alienate these Aryan allies. Nevertheless, he repeatedly found himself in the position of having to enlighten them about the government's latest round of restrictions. And his listeners were almost always genuinely surprised to hear about these laws. Their ignorance in the face of all the anti-Semitic propaganda blared daily from radios, blazoned from the newspapers, seemed to be more a function of people's tendency towards plodding self-preoccupation than an indication of any active complicity with the advancing evil.
   
   I think you'll find that Klemperer's account also carries a very relevant warning to us in our current pursuit of terrorists at all costs. Klemperer survived the early rounds of call-ups for the concentration camps because he was a decorated World War I hero, and because he was married to an Aryan. For these reasons, he was given some initial grudging dispensation from the worst Nazi reprisals. However as the War progressed, his past service to Germany and his Aryan affiliation came to count for less and less. Finally his number was up and he, along with the last handful of Jews remaining around Dresden, were scheduled for transport. The only thing that saved him was the Allied bombing of Dresden. Most local Nazi records were destroyed in this notorious bombardment. So Klemperer and his wife, having survived the bombing, were also able to survive those last most brutal months of the Nazi regime by assuming new identities and wandering through the German countryside from town to town, passing themselves off as a typical displaced Aryan couple. If the Nazis' meticulous records (documenting family lineages and confirming who was where) had remained intact, Klemperer would certainly have been deported to the gas chambers.
   
   So if you don't already have doubts about the increasing surveillance measures being taken in the U.S., presumably to guard against terrorists and other "evildoers" - reading these journals will give you pause. One of the lessons of Klemperer's journal is how tyranny proceeds by little increments of paperwork. Its power is in keeping tabs.
   
   Klemperer risked his life to write the entries in these journals, because it eventually became a capital crime for a Jew to possess paper or any pen/pencil. So it feels almost sacrilegious to make any criticism of this supremely brave and literate account. However I do have one small criticism. And that is Klemperer's common masculine tendency to put his wife in the background of his life. Eva Klemperer comes off in the diary as a shadowy adjunct to the importance of Victor's work producing these pages.
   
   She is mentioned, more frequently in the first volume of the diaries, but this mention is usually limited to reports of the fact that she had another hysterical fit that day, or that she engaged Victor in another round of angry lamentation, or that she suffered some physical malady. He does acknowledge her collaborative bravery. She also risked her life every time she smuggled the pages of his work out of their small assigned apartment into the hands of friends for safekeeping. But we never directly hear Eva's voice in all this. The reader is only left to guess at the actual substance of her outbursts.
   
   You will probably feel impelled to read between the lines to flesh her out. Perhaps Eva wasn't the prettiest girl in school, so she took the one marriage proposal that came her way. She married the intellectually accomplished Victor. Victor was available because Aryan prejudice, even in those early years, already limited him socially. We can imagine her outbursts of recrimination as the Nazi noose grew tighter around their yoked necks. Why did you have to be Jewish? Why have you dragged me down with you? I could have led such a happy life. And instead, look at me - scrounging for rotten potatoes, under constant threat of beatings and death - and all because of you!
   
   If only Eva had written her own diary, we might have had some additional fascinating insights into why and how a couple stays together under such trying circumstances. We might have gained a greater understanding of the ties of love and the chains of having nowhere else to go. As it is, we have only Victor's side of the story. But that is a powerful, must-read insight into how tyranny grows, brick-by-brick, petty edict by petty edict.



4. Because my friends all know what a book-hound I am, people often ask me what my all-time favorite book is. Admittedly the answer to this would change over time, but, at present, "I Will Bear Witness" is the one that first pops into my mind.
   
   I found this very personal account of the days and nights of a German Jewish man--an inoffensive and formerly rather conservative German nationalist academic married to a Gentile--during the Nazi terror regime to be absolutely breathtaking. Indeed, I was so caught up in his account that I took an unexpected day of vacation from work just to not interrupt my reading once I had started.
   
   Further, I found myself sprawled on my bed, as is sometimes customary with me, surrounded by ancillary books, atlases, and maps --a behavior that signifies I'm reading a book that has utterly gripped me and a book that is expanding my horizons.
   
   Klemperer was (just barely) saved from being sent to a concentration camp due to his marriage to a non-Jew. However, he lived every day under the threat of torture and deportation to a camp and his journal tells of the years of grinding anxiety over his fate and the fate of his wife, friends, and relatives-many of whom were taken. It also speaks to the minutiae of life under the Nazi's--such things as their penchant for legalisms to justify their treatment of the Jews embodied in his incessant embroilment in Nazi demands that he take part in the legalisms of their confiscation of his property. Moreover, as the war draws to a close, he draws a stunning portrait of life as a war refugee--a picture that applies to war refugees the world over throughout time.
   
   Kudos to those who elevated this book to number one among the history choices-it deserves it and in my mind deserves even more.



5. Victor Klemperer's diary of the years of the Hitler dictatorship and his recording of the day-to-day lives of the Jews of Dresden, his thoughtful and insightful commentary on the methods (particularly the language of the propaganda) of the Third Reich, the heart-wrenching stories of those who were taken away never to be seen again, his experience in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 and his miraculous journey home should be required reading for everyone about the horrors of tyranny and war. It is also a tribute to the true human spirit and the power of the intellect. Klemperer never lost his determination to live, despite all the blows of terror that were aimed at him, his family, and his friends. That he believed there was something to live for--in the midst of utter barbarity--should inspire all of us to work for a better world. It did me.
   
   A remarkable record of a dark time. Reading it gives one the courage to carry on in the dark times that have come again.

5 comments about All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs.

1. Elie Wiesel may be best known as the author of "Night", his harrowing and sparse account of his time spent in the concentration camps. His literary works have focused around the events that shaped Holocaust survivors and the questions those survivors had about their faith afterwards. His life's work is heavily imbued by those events early in his life, his novels vast testaments to making sure the world never forgets the atrocities man inflicted upon man.
   
   Yet there are many sides to this amazing man, which can often be forgotten when one dwells solely on his literary works. The first volume of Wiesel's memoirs, "All Rivers Run to the Sea", is a brilliant introduction and elucidation of the author. He relates quickly his early childhood and his time in the camps, but moves onto and focuses on his path after those events. As he forges a career as a journalist, meeting statesmen and celebrities, he finds himself and what causes he is willing to fight for. As a stateless person, his life is often difficult as he arouses suspicion, and he struggles constantly to make ends meet. Reading about his personal adventures, the reader sees how he is passionate, full of empathy, timid and captivating, a brilliant man with many stories to tell.
   
   For anyone who has read Wiesel's writings, the style of "All Rivers Run to the Sea" will be just as familiar: while it is divided into sections, his reminiscenses are as tangential as his fictional stories. Learning about his real-life adventures, readers can easily see how Wiesel has woven his experiences into all of his fictional works. The praises and accolades he has received are more than well deserved, for as long as he writes, his people will have a testimony to their past and to their faith.



2. This spectacular memoir of Elie Wiesel, the great author and voice of conscience, begins with his boyhood in the small Transylvanian village of Sighet.
   
   A pious child, with a great thirst for Jewish knowledge, a student of Torah and Talmud, and fascinated with the Kabbalah. Elie is swept into the Nazi ghetto and then death cams where he loses his parents and his beautiful little blond sister Tzipora, all of whom perished in the Nazi furnaces.
   
   He writes in memory of his losses:
   
   "If only I could recapture my father's wisdom, my little sister's innocent grace. If only I could recapture the rage of the resistance fighter, the suffering of the mystic dreamer, the solitude of the orphan in a sealed cattle car, the death of each and every one of them. If only I could step out of myself and merge with them".
   
   Wiesel writes of the prophecy told to his mother by the Wizhnitz Rabbi that her son would become a gadol b'Israel (a great man in Israel) but that she would not live to see it.
   
   Wiesel records some of the horrors he witnessed in the death camps such as live children being thrown into furnaces by the Nazis, and laments the inaction by the Allies to do anything about the extermination they knew was taking place of the Jews- saving Jews was not a priority for the Allies either.
   
   He mentions that most of the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis were intellectuals- not surprising in light of the fact hat most Jews who have thrown themselves into the campaign of hate against their fellow Jews in Israel.
   
   He writes about the liberation of the death camps by the Allies after the war, and how one of the youngest child survivors of Buchenwald was eight year old Israel Meir Lau, later to be the Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of Israel. In his section of his travels around the world as a young man during the early 1950s he writes of his great compassion at the plight of poverty-stricken children in India.
   
   Wiesel records his life in a youth home for Jewish refugees in Paris and the fate of displaced Jews after World War II, his life as a journalist for Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot for whom he covered the Eichmann trial, civil rights struggles, the Six Day War, the 1968 Student insurrections in France, and other world events.
   
   He has always been greatly interested in philosophy and parapsychology and writes of his discussions with such great leaders as Golda Meir and David
   Ben-Gurion, as well as the greatest thinkers of the day. He writes of his great love for Israel and it's people for which he has been attacked by the hate-filled bigots of the International Left. He also took a strong stand for persecuted Soviet Jewry during the 1960s and 1970s. Elie Wiesel also writes of his great compassion for humanity as a whole, such as his pain at seeing the suffering of destitute children during his travels in India. But unlike certain Jews of the Left, he does not see a contradiction between this and his great love of Israel and the Jewish people- Ahavat Israel.
   
   He writes with great compassion, passion, anger, sadness and hope.
   In a plea for the plight of his own people today, especially the youth and children of Israel today targeted by terror and forces of genocide (such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Ahmadinejad regime- as well as all who are sympathetic to these anti-Jewish elements) he penned an open letter to President Bush stating: "Please remember that the maps on Arafat's uniform and in Palestinian children's textbooks show a Palestine encompassing not only all of the West Bank but all of Israel, while Palestinian leaders loudly proclaim that 'Palestine extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, from Rosh Hanikra (in the North) to Rafah (in Gaza). Please remember Danielle Shefi, a little girl in Israel. Danielle was five. When the murderers came, she hid under her bed. Palestinian gunmen found and killed her anyway. Think of all the other victims of terror in the Holy Land. With rare exceptions, the targets were young people, children and families. Please remember that Israel--having lost too many sons and daughters, mothers and fathers--desperately wants peace. It has learned to trust its enemies' threats more than the empty promises of 'neutral' governments".
   Elie Wiesel is a true voice of truth and conscience.



3. I found this a very compelling read, lasting over several readings. It's true the author did not stick tightly to chronological order, but anyone who has read his fiction knows his style tends to be very esoteric and rather free-floating (I personally do not care for his fiction, which I admit I do find to go over my head). However, as a reader, I certainly got a feel for emotions he felt throughout different experiences in his life. I found the last scene describing his emotions before and during his wedding to be really profound. It's true that there is a lot of Jewish content in this book, which may cause some of his analogies etc. to be less accessible to someone from a different background. However, for someone who wants to read a first-hand Holocaust experience without very strong graphic details, I do recommend it. (As a side note, just last week I actually attended a speech by Mr. Wiesel, and he is really a personable, funny, self-effacing and sweet man, not the really sad and somber person you might expect from his writings. I was surprised by this, pleasantly so!)



4. I would strongly recommend that all readers on Amazon read the review whose title caption is ' Remember'. It is far more extensive and far better than the small remarks I am about to post.
   Elie Weisel is the one human being who more than any other has helped the world understand the horror of the Shoah , the Holocaust the Nazi destruction of one - third of the Jewish people six million human beings.
   For this he should always have a place in the historical consciousness of both the Jewish people and mankind.
   His memoir is at times very moving .For those who know his other work and his masterpiece ' Night' there will be much familiar here, though here the story is enriched by greater detail.
   I find myself whenever I am reading Weisel unable to really judge in abstract or purely literary terms. His significance as a human being, as a witness as one who has spoken to me in my own life is so great that my feeling is closer to reverence than anything else.
   I read this book with the idea that any additional detail about his life and work, any additional understanding of his thought about Man's relation to G-d would be worthwhile. I read this work as I will read all his future works as an admiring student of a great teacher.
   May he be blessed by many more years of great creative work.



5. This is one of the times when I think we should be able to go higher than 5 stars. Elie Wiesel's All Rivers Run to the Sea gave us a more in-depth look to the concentration camp survivor. He really gives us a rich experience in weaving together the threads of his past, from his days in school to the horror in the concentration camps, right up to his days of being a journalist, and ending with him as a groom. You really get a feel for the type of person he is as well - a wonderful, compassionate, and intelligent man. If you've read Night already, you're definitely going to want to check this out.

5 comments about My Brother's Voice: How a Young Hungarian Boy Survived the Holocaust: A True Story.

1. I found the book, My Brother's Voice, to be extremely powerful, moving, challenging and awakening. I was unable to put it down once I started it and would recommend it to anyone who feels they may have challenges in their life. Mr. Nasser shares that it is the power of your mind that triumphs over all. It was a truly moving and thought provoking read. I give it my highest recommendation.



2. I just finished listening to Mr. Nasser speak with 3 classrooms of fifth graders and admit I was moved to tears. Even though few "gory" details were given (naturally to fifth graders) the essence and horror of what he endured could be felt in the room. How courageous a man to keep alive and share those horror-filled times; not to mention the sadness of losing your entire family. Thank you mr. Nasser for your honesty and courage and for not allowing us to ever forget. "Never again."



3. I just purchased this book right from Mr. Nasser. I attended a talk that he gave to some students this afternoon. Before even reading this book, I can tell you that it will touch our hearts, and more importantly, will change the future. Hearing about how he put together his diary to make sure the truth was finally told makes me think that I will start and finish this book tonight. G-d bless you, Mr. Nasser.



4. Before I begin..because this comment is long if you want a heartfelt personal account of the Holocaust READ THIS BOOK!!
   On a recent trip to Poland I was fortunate (or unfortunate enough) to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. The visit heigthened my interest in the Holocaust that we have all heard of, read books and saw pictures of. However, the impact of actually being there in the buildings that housed those that survived the gas chambers by being "strong" enough to work. The gas chambers and crematorium where hundreds of thousands of the weak, the sick, the old, most women and children too young to work, met a horrific end to their precious lives! This very camp is where 13 year old Steven "Pista" and his 16 year old brother Ardis, along with their family members, began their journey after being rounded up by the Nazis.
   
   After visiting Auschwitz and returning home to Las Vegas, I became thirsty for knowledge to understand how such a horrific event could have occured right under our noses as WWII was in full bloom! I began reading and watching everything I could get my hands on, beginning with Schindler's List. I had seen the movie when it first came out, but it was far more impactful after actually visiting the factory, which is also being turned into a memorial much like Auschwitz. As I read book after book and watched movie after movie I still could not get my arms around the event. One morning I was reading our local paper, The Review Journal I came across an Ad about My Brothers Voice. I hurried to the nearest bookstore and bought the book. I began reading the book and could not put it down. I would read before I went to work.....worry about Pista and Ardis all day, hurrying to return home at the end of my day so I could read more, and to make sure they were OK. I read the book in 2 days!
   
   Of all the books I had read, including the Diary of Anne Frank..all paled in comparison to the extremely well written account of Dear Pista and Ardis' horrific journey. As I read the book I felt like I was there with them, could see what they saw, and feel what they felt! At this point, I will add that I am an American Catholic with an unexplained ignorance of what really happened from 1939-1945....that ignorance no longer exists! After reading this book I felt I knew Pista and Ardis, that is how well written this book is. It also helped me to put some closure to my recent obsession...the Holocaust.
   
   About one month after reading this wonderfully written book, I had the pleasure of meeting Pista, who it turns out lives right here in Las Vegas! I saw another Ad in the paper advertising his book and a phone number to call if interested in having him speak at schools, churches, and other organizations. I work for MGM Mirage which is a huge advocate of Diversity Training. I thought how wonderful if we could have him speak at some of our many Diversity Classes! I called the number and to my surprise it was PISTA that answered the phone. I was speechless, for a couple of seconds!!!! After a lengthy conversation with this wonderful man it turned out that he was having a book signing that very night. After work I rushed home to get my daughter and went to listen and learn more from Pista! He is such a sweet and passionate man, now fortunately much older than the 13 year old boy that endured what no child or adult should have to. He is not bitter, he is not predudiced, he has forgiven, but not forgotten what we must all learn more about. Not just to be better Americans and appreciate how lucky we are to be born in the US, but to be better human beings!! To love our families and our friends, to be grateful that we have good food and plenty of it to eat. We have a warm comfortable bed to sleep in and we work hard to have these things, not work because we are forced and beaten falling into "bed" starving, having eaten only a small piece of sawdust bread after a hard days work. Unimagenable...you bet, but TRUE! It would be impossible to write a book like My Brother's Voice without having lived through Pista's misfortune of being born to a family of Hungarian Jews! Same as my opening comment, my closing comment is the same.....READ THIS BOOK!!! I promise you, you will see the world through different eyes!
   
   Denise Fillmore
   Las Vegas, Nevada



5. I am wordless, I read several stories about Holocaust survivals but nothing like this one, you can feel the pain in every page, you suffer with Pista, cry with Pista, and hope with Pista that this never will be part of our Humanity again.
   The book is not only very informative about what was going on at the time, but also very well written, English is my second language and the lecture of the book was so easy and good. When you start reading the book is impossible to stop, you want to know more and more.
   
   I work with juveniles who are engage in gang activity, we teach them the similitude between genocide and gang activity, I explained them Mr. Pista's story and they could not believe that someone can suffer that much and still alive, and not only that but being so positive and optimistic like Mr. Pista is; this is a MUST for every youth in my program. I also work with girls' group homes and I always recommend this book to every girl in the house.
   
   My husband and I had the honor to know Mr. Pista and his beautiful wife Francoise, they are two beautiful human beings and we thank them for being part of our lives.

5 comments about The Periodic Table.

1. Like other reviewers, I sometimes found the science in this book a bit hard to follow. But that was made up for by the general loveliness of Levi's dry wit. My favorite examples-
   
   - "a livered [solidified] paint is much more rebellious, more refractory to your will than a lion in its mad pounce; but, let's admit it, it's also less dangerous."
   
   - "Gina then made a cruel decision: if she couldn't bind herself to the man she cared for, the only one, there would not be any other . . . she forbade herself marriage forever in a refined and merciless manner, that is, by getting married."
   
   -"It was clear that Bonino's story would be far from brief; but I remembered how many long stories I myself had inflicted on people, on those who wanted to listen and those who didn't. I remembered that it is written [Deuteronomy 10:19] 'Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.' and I settled back comfortably in my chair."
   
   - [before the start of the book] "Troubles overcome are good to tell."
   
   This is not a Holocaust memoir like some of Levi's other works; it is a group of [mostly autobiographical] little essays, almost all about Levi's pre- and post-Holocaust life, by a great writer who just happened to have been in Auschwitz.



2. Entertaining, sad, and insightful. What a loss to the world. "Carbon" chapter is fascinating. Began second reading immediately following the first.



3. It's an emblematic title for a book designed whit tales that confection a whole history. The book is a metaphor of the periodic table: elements conform substance so words conform ideas.
   
   Primo Levi is a mentor; he begins a melancholic tale, connecting us with characters and at less expected time we receive a little lesson about chemistry, -it's a good way to spread science, didn't it?- but that's not enough for him so we also get his testimony about how he suffered WWII.
   
   Primo's statement is hard: "... I felt guilty at being man, because man had built Auschwitz..." at last it's not clear if he got peace at his mind; but, I must recognize he is honest, because somewhere in the book he says that Primo Levi writes for Primo Levi.
   
   In conclusion, it's a gentle book wrote to present a testimony of a man who was born Jewish in Italy, studied chemistry and suffered the war.



4. I didn't know what to expect when picking up this book. I'd recently finished the not unrelated Garden of the Finzi-Continis and thought I might find some variant on this. Yes, both books consider Jewish-Italian culture in the years surrounding WWII, with the specter of the holocaust in the background (mainly). But they are quite different. F.C. has at its roots the humanities, and P.T., the sciences. And what I most enjoyed about P.T. was the chemistry. It's a rarity in literature to find a subtle appreciation for the career of the scientist, and Levi succeeds admirably. This book would be an outstanding choice for any science and engineering student to read just to see how one can ply a trade, be it in the laboratory, the mine, or the consulting business. Bravo, Dr. Levi.



5. In this collection of stories, Primo Levi lets go of the Holocaust theme, and tells the story of his life through the prism of his profession as a chemist. As others have said, each chapter is headed up by a different element, and through the properties of that element he explores a theme. There are two chapters--"Lead" and "Mercury"--which are completely fanciful. "Lead" is about a mythical tribe that makes its living mining lead. Not knowing that the metal is deadly, they all ultimately die of a mysterious disease, but they accept it as their fate, the price they pay for fulfilling a special role among men. "Mercury" is about a couple living on a desert island, which holds inexhaustible reserves of mercury, and what happens when two newcomers, one an alchemist, joins them. Both stories are riveting.
   
   I have to admit that I, as well as my very literate book group, lost a lot by having forgotten most if not all of our knowledge of chemistry--not that we had much to begin with. Some familiarity with the science I'm sure reveals a whole new level to the writing.
   
   Some reviewers criticized the lack of insight about the author's time in Auschwitz, but I see that as one of the amazing aspects of this book. For good reason, so many Holocaust survivors are irreversibly marked and changed forever by their experiences. That Levi can write a rich and compelling book that gives weight and significance to the other parts of his life is evidence of an amazingly strong and resilient spirit.

5 comments about The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany.

1. My bookclub is entering into its Holocaust Month. Someone recommended this book to me last year and I thought, it sounded interesting enough to read. Interesting just barely describes this book. Haunting is more the word that I think of when I finished this book. Incredibly lucky are two more words.
   
   There are so many books out there about the Holocaust that it can be confusing sometimes to read what. This book definitely should be read simply because it's beautifully moving, tragically sad and not only that, it provides a different viewpoint of what happened during the early years of Nazihood in Germany and before the "Final Solution" was proposed to exterminate the Jews. This happened and I don't recall hearing much about any of this till I read this book. Before Hitler and Goring proposed the death camps and just while trying to get rid of Germany of the non-Aryan blood, they came up with a solution that provides entertainment and music/art/theater productions just for the Jews. This is a place for the Jews to retreat to. They were only allowed to play Jewish pieces written by Jewish artists/musicans. And they were left alone in the 30s and early 40s. Well, not quite completely left alone as they still had to follow the Nazi rules. But it was a place of refuge for the Jews, especially in Berlin.
   
   This book, while devoting a huge portion to the Kulturbund and its orgins, the author writes of his personal family history. His mother and father were musicans in the Kulturbund. And they suffered horrible tragedies as the war progressed over the years. However, they were young, in love and naive like a lot of people were. They did manage to escape Germany but they also managed to leave behind family members which have haunted them and their children even to this day. It is very intense reading at times and with hindsight on the reader's part, it is very hard to fathom their optimism that things will work out ok in the end. Not only that, this book brings up the question of whether or not the Kulturbund was good for the Jews or kept them compliant enough to keep them in Germany instead of escaping to other countries, so the Nazis could gas them too. This book is haunting and disturbing. The questions that the author may have unknowingly stirred are now raised in my mind ... and the answers are not easy to figure out.
   
   This is not your typical Holocaust book nor is it like the other books about the camps ~~ this book simply tells a tale of two musicans who were unfortunate to be caught up in the times that stirred Germany (and the world) ~~ but yet, their love of music has sustained them through the years before they left Germany. Are they heros? Not in the sense that we associate it with. They are more like survivors and like all survivors, they carry a burden of guilt that resounded through the years. But it is a book that honors the memory of those who were left behind in a time of turmoil that even today, still vibrates through the years.
   
   9-28-07



2. MG's story of his family during the early Nazi era is an unusual glimpse into the lives of German Jews during the period from 1933-1941. He writes about the Kulturbund, an organization created by the Nazis to (1) rid Germany of Jewish influence in the arts and (2) provide propaganda coverage of the maltreatment of Jews by the Third Reich.
   
   In my opinion the book is generally well written and seems to be the result of careful research. My one complaint is that MG frequently quotes conversations which I doubt have been recorded in any way. I don't like that in historical writing, but in this case I was willing to overlook it, because of my interest in the story.



3. What do we really know about our parents' life before we were born? That depends largely, I guess, on how much of an interest we show - and on how much they are willing to reveal. Because in the life of every person there are instances and times they rather wish to forget, and not revive time and again by discussion, even if only among their nearest and dearest.

   Such, in the lives of author Martin Goldsmith's parents, were the years from 1933 through 1941; so much so, in fact, that Goldsmith likens that time to the massive ash tree in the house of Germanic warlord Hunding, the setting of the first scene of Richard Wagner's opera "Die Walkuere:" Something looming large, yet never openly acknowledged. Because before George Gunther Goldsmith, furniture and home decorating salesman of Cleveland, Ohio, and his wife Rosemary, a violinist with the St. Louis Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra, became American citizens in 1947, they had lived a whole other life - the hunted life of Jews in Adolf Hitler's Germany. And only years after his mother's death, on a trip to his father's home town of Oldenburg, did Goldsmith catch the first glimpses of what was hidden behind that massive ash tree, and George Goldsmith began to talk about the events which his, the Goldschmidt family had witnessed there; as well as the early life of Rosemarie nee Gumpert in Duesseldorf, the couple's first meeting in Frankfurt, and their later life in Berlin until their lucky escape to the United States. Beginning with this visit, Martin Goldsmith retraced his family's path to the early years of the 20th century, when his paternal grandfather Alex Goldschmidt took residence in Oldenburg, and his maternal grandfather Julian Gumpert settled in Duesseldorf.

   How intensely personal this voyage into the past must have been becomes clear in the account of Goldsmith's visit to Oldenburg prison, as a participant in a march retracing the path taken by the Jews - among them the author's grandfather - driven through the streets of Oldenburg in 1938 by Nazi thugs, to later be shipped off (at least temporarily) to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But although he writes about his very own family, and now in full knowledge of their fate, Goldsmith's narrative is in no way sentimental. With a journalist's detachment he talks about Guenther and Rosemarie, Alex, Julian and their wives and other children; turning a nonfiction account whose outcome is clear from the very start into a heartstopping tale few would be able to believe if presented with it under colors other than that of the plain historic truth.

   Prominently featured in Goldsmith's account is the Jewish Culture Association, or Juedischer Kulturbund; as of 1933 the German Jews' only permitted artistic organization, in whose orchestra Guenther and Rosemarie had met and which had formed the center of their life until they finally left the country. One of the most controversial institutions of Nazi Germany, it reunited what was left of the country's Jewish musicians, artists, writers and composers - providing a modicum of shelter in an increasingly hostile environment, but also a convenient tool in the Nazi propaganda machine. Were the members of the Kulturbund instrumentalized to deceive public opinion, at home and abroad, about the true intentions of Hitler's government? By giving their Jewish audience a sense of comfort and "belonging," did they also prevent some of them from rescuing themselves when there still would have been time? The surviving members of the "Kubu" and their families, interviewed by Goldsmith, come down on both sides of the issue; and the fate of the survivors is probably as symptomatic as that of the many who ultimately did perish in Nazi concentration camps - chiefly among those the Kulturbund's charismatic founder Dr. Singer, who not only let himself deceive into returning to Germany after already having reached the safe shores of the U.S. but saw a mark of distinction even in his deportation to the "model" concentration camp of Theresienstadt.

   Yet, for Guenther and Rosemarie the years with the Kulturbund were dominated, above all, by the musical companionship they experienced. What does seem to have haunted them most for the rest of their lives, however, was their very escape to America, while their remaining family members were stuck in Europe and, one way or another, died in Hitler's concentration camps - and the feeling that with a little effort they just *might* have saved at least some of them. The letters of Alex Goldschmidt and his younger son Helmut, written to Guenther from captivity in France after their own unsuccessful attempt to flee to Cuba, are among the most chilling testimonials contained in this book; and the decision to translate and include them conceivably cannot have been an easy one for Goldsmith. Indeed, it apparently was the knowledge of his family's fate that, all talent and love of music aside, eventually compelled George Goldsmith to forever retire the flute which, in his life as Guenther Goldschmidt, had been the only item of true importance besides his beloved wife Rosemarie; thus punishing himself in a way no outsider could have done. Yet, the couple's gift for music lives on in their son, who in his own way has brought many hours of joy to radio listeners all over the U.S.

   Martin Goldsmith's "Inextinguishable Symphony" - named for Danish composer Carl Nielsen's Fourth Symphony, which sets music, as a parable for life itself, against war, terror and destruction - is as much a personal journey of discovery as a journalist's account of historic facts; seeking to understand rather than to judge. It deals with a time in which morality was thoroughly upset by a profoundly immoral regime, which cannot possibly have remained without effect on anybody who witnessed those events. In applying our own values to those facts, I think we would all do well in being careful to, likewise, make a thorough effort to understand before we judge. Goldsmith's insightful account is a great place to begin such a process.




4. This story was impossible to put down and when you finish, it stays with you for a very long time. Its hard to believe that Gunther and Rosemary didn't make every effort to help their parents emigrate to U. S. What really bothers me most is, not being Jewish, what would I have done in Germany in the late thirties and early forties when I saw these atrocities happening?



5. I listened to Martin Goldsmith on "Performance Today" (and still listen to his successor, Fred Child) for many years. This man who for years described classical music on the radio -- composers and their life story, pieces and their histories, in accessible, engaging, and lightly humorous ways, and even sometimes tied it in to his love of baseball -- he also has an extraordinary family story. It's moving and well-written, and makes me think about the extraordinary stories that must dwell in the depths of my own geneological past.

5 comments about In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust.

1. This Book is for everybody to read, it is very interesting and powerful



2. The book, In My Brother's Image, was a book that caught my attention and made me want to keep reading. This book showed this very well. You learn about Gyuri and Miklos', identical twin brothers, life before the war when they were best friends, during the war how religion had torn them apart and the events leading to it, and after how different they had become. Miklos' son Eugene wrote the book, not Gyuri or Miklos. He vicariously wrote it and he makes it seem as though he were right there. The accounts in this book are based upon his father, uncle, aunt, and printed documents from the time such as newspapers and books.
   I, personally, am very into the Holocaust and what happened to families before, during, and after the war so if you are too I definitely think you should consider this book. If you like to see how people can change on a general level this is a good book. If you are like me, liking to learn about the Holocaust or history for that matter, this is an excellent book. Those on grade level 10, 11, and 12 (and on) will be able to understand book because of the language and words used. So once again read this book.



3. I remember reading about this real-life story a number of years before this book was actually published; I still have the clipped article from the Boston Globe in one of my scrapbooks. Then, when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mr. Pogany came to our Hillel one Friday night and after services and dinner read from his book and spoke to us about the story behind it. Having met the author makes reading a book even better!
   
   I've very interested in what befell Hungarian Jewry during WWII, possibly because it's so painful and haunting to realise that they were the last nation to be invaded by the Nazis, the final Jewish community in Europe still pretty much fully intact, but for the men who had been drafted into labour battalions or sent off to work camps several years earlier. It's an even more interesting and unique story because the family became Catholics shortly after WWI ended, and they were very devout, so much so that the author's uncle Gyuri eventually became a priest, and his father, Miklós, had seriously contemplated becoming one too. Because of a painful health condition, Gyuri got permission to recover his health in Italy, which was a stroke of luck, since he got out before things really began getting worse and worse, even before the arrival of the Nazis. Though the twins' mother was deported and murdered, the rest of the family did not live in the small town she did, and because they were in Budapest did not suffer the fate of the other Hungarian Jews in smaller towns and cities, who were packed into ghettos and then deported. The Budapest Ghetto wasn't erected until very late in the War, and when Miklós and his wife Muci (also a distant cousin of his) were finally deported, they were "only" taken to Bergen-Belsen as opposed to one of the death camps in Poland like the majority of their Hungarian co-religionists had been.
   
   Because he was tucked away safely in Italy, a place which only lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, in the care of the holy mystic Padre Pio, Gyuri was not subject to anything like his twin brother and the rest of their family were. He could never understand why his beloved twin had lost faith in Catholicism and Christianity, how he could go back to Judaism, the religion they'd left as small boys and had never even really been very much of a part of in their early years before they all converted. Many people both then and now have made apologies for the collaboration, either active or through silent complicity, of ordinary citizens in allowing the Shoah to take place, much like Gyuri did, but Miklós and Muci had seen firsthand what had happened to them. Despite nearly thirty years of being a good Catholic, he was not protected from even the "good" labour brigade for converts. In the eyes of the Nazis and ordinary Hungarians, his family were still Jewish. The local parish priest arranged for their mother Gabriella to be taken from the ghetto to his church every day to hear Mass before she was deported, but he still didn't try to hide her or protect her from deportation. This book explores the complex relationship between not only the brothers who were separated by faith but also how the Church failed to protect its members, all members, and to speak out against what was going on, and how something of such a large scale could never have happened without the kind of hatred and collaboration from the common folk that the Poganies saw breaking through the surface after the Nazis and Hungarian fascists came to power.



4. I thought this was a good book and could not put it down. It explores the issues of assimilation among Budapest's Jews, conversion issues, Jewish and Catholic relations, Jesiwh security or lack thereof, Catholic complicity in the Holocaust and the Catholic church setting the stage for millenia that made the Holocaust possible. It also talks of family love and connectedness despite serious philosophical differences. We're discussing this in my book club and it should be very interesting.



5. As the child of parents who came from the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary, and as one raised within that Orthodoxy, albeit transplanted to America, this book exposed me to a portion of Hungarian Jewish history I never really knew. This book speaks of the tragedy of so many Hungarian Jews. Jews who were totally estranged from their ancestral faith, who had no attachment to their heritage. For those people, Judaism was an undesirabe yoke to be cast aside or at best ignored. This book tells the reader however that one cannot truly escape his true identity. The true hero of the book, the author's father, discovers this in the hell of Bergen-Belsen. His uncle, the priest, spends the war in relative safety, but always in fear that he would be denounced. That uncle also has to contend with the very real possiblity that his Hungarian coreligionists "allowed" him to escape to Italy into the warm embrace of Padre Pio and the Capuchin monks not out of dedication to him in the spirit of Christian fellowship, but rather out of a desire to be rid of another Jew.
   The emotions that pervade this book are powerful. The characters are real. The dialogue, while made up, displays the pathos of the characters and speaks to the reader's soul.
   This book is about many things: religion, families and their dysfunctions, theodicy, Catholic-Jewish relations, and overding all of those, this book is about the complexity of life. Like all great works, the message of this book will be shaped by the reader and his/her weltanschaung.

5 comments about From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust.

1. I had a hard time putting this book down. Eichengreen does a good job of telling her story - it wasn't confusing and I didn't come away with a lot of unanswered questions. Obviously someone who didn't experience the Holocaust first hand will never fully appreciate or understand it, but I feel like I gained some insight into through this book.



2. This is a very well written personal story about this most awful period in our world's history.



3. I was extremely impressed with this book. The author decribes in detail her life before anti-semitism and how it started to change. Her story is emotional and touching.

   She was born Celia Landau and changed her name to Lucille. She and her sister Karin were the products of a very close knit family completely torn apart by the Third Reich. Her father gets sent off to a labor camp and a year later they are delivered a box of what supposedly contains his ashes. Eventually Celia, Karin and mother are sent to the Lodz ghetto where surviving is difficult and their mother eventually dies of starvation. Celia's account of this is very sad and moving. She then tells a story of a tender love affair with Szaja in the ghetto, and befriends an elderly couple named Jules and Julius who ironically after liberation, she winds up marrying their son when she moves to New York.

   She and her sister Karin are then sent to Auschwitz. Poor Karin is so devastated and having trouble surviving day to day after losing both her parents. Celia's heart is again broken when Karin is not chosen in the selection and is loaded up into a truck and never seen again.

   Celia is only weeks away from death when Auschwitz gets liberated. She goes into detail her life after the camps including her testimony during war crimes trials that helped put many of the SS in prison.

   She also tells her experiences of going back to Europe in 1991 for the first time since she left. The hostility and indifference against Jews was still alive.

   This book is highly recommended. Well written.




4. How Cecelia (aka Lucille) survived is beyond imagination. What determination.



5. As a child in Hamburg, Germany, Celia Landau led a cultured and privileged life. Her father Benjamin had a study full of books and frequently entertained renowned visitors, including philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Paul Holzer. This began to unravel when the Nazis came to power. In the summer of 1934, the family traveled to a German spa in Bad Schwartau. As their visit ended, the spa's owner gleefully announced that Hitler would deal with the Jews. The next fall, nine-year-old Celia's grades began to falter as former school friends labeled her "Drechtjude." In 1937, the family were forced out of their condominium at Hohe Weide 25. In October, 1938, her father was carted to prison, then deported to Dachau. In February 1941, a Gestapo agent deliver his "ashes" in a cigar box.

   Eight months later, Celia, now 16, was deported with her mother Sala and sister Karin to Lodz. Here they shared an unheated room on Zgierska Street with Julie and Julius Eichengreen and five others. As the vast majority of Jews were shipped like cattle from Lodz, the couple made Celia promise, if ever she went to New York, to find their son, who had left Europe years earlier. On July 13, 1942, Celia's starving and sick mother Sala died.

   Before being herself deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, Celia starved and scraped to survive, and lost her sister Karin as well. Her one friend from that period, Elli Sabin, traveled with her in the final transport from Lodz to new horrors. Here she came face to face with the dreaded Dr. Mengele, slaved for some months in an outdoor construction site at the Neuengamme subcamp and in the Blom and Foss Shipyards. In October, she was transferred to Arbeitslager Sasel. Here, to gain access to important files, she promised to transfer her family's house in Altona-Luna Park outside Hamburg to an SS guard. The ploy worked, and she memorized the names and addressed of 42 Nazi guards.

   In March 1945, Celia Landau was again transferred, this time to Bergen-Belsen, the disease-ridden camp where Anne Frank and her sister died of Typhus. Fortunately for Laudau, a month later, the camp was liberated, on April 15, 1945. Here she told a British major of her exploit, and was swiftly introduced to Lieutenant-Colonel J.H. Tilling, of Britain's War Crimes Investigations unit. When friends Elli, Hela Dimand and Sabina Zarecki corroborated her story, the British swiftly transferred Celia Landau to Hanover Germany, where she helped bring 17 Nazis to justice.

   Her assistance to the British War Crimes unit gave Celia new opportunities. What she did with them is but one of the things that makes this book fascinating. This is the story of an extraordinary woman who sought revenge only through her own good deeds.

   The one thing missing from this book is what gave her the courage to go on. Alyssa A. Lappen

5 comments about After Long Silence.

1. Imagine as a young adult, passionately involved in your career, you start pulling away the pieces of the facade your parents had created to protect you and your sister fom the truth about your own family. Like pulling a thread and unravelling your entire wardrobe to show your nakedness, Helen Fremont knew whe was dealing with sensitive, even explosive issues, but he could not stop pulling that thread.
   What she has done with this remarkable memoir is show her family's roots and branches in ways she never knew existed before she and her sister began discussing the "What if's?" It is a moving story packed with complicated relationships and the true history of her parents' lives and the terrors they went through during the Holocaust era in Europe. You finish the book wondering how such a powerful story could be supressed, and cheering for Helen Fremont for unearthing it. As with so many memoirs, you are also left wondering, "where are they now?" and hoping for a sequel.



2. I have given this book as a gift to at least five friends. I couldn't put it down!



3. From today's perspective, it is difficult to comprehend just why a couple who survived the Holocaust would hide their Jewish identify from their daughters for years, insisting that they are Polish Catholic refugees in the USA. This memoir, however, explains how their fear of a repeat pogrom drives them to deny their heritage, keep secret their loss of religious identify, and assuage their horrific memories and guilt at surviving.Fremont and her sister's quest to discover the truth causes their parents much pain, but the author is clear that the family's pain had dominated their lives since birth.



4. I was very surprised to learn that Helen Fremont was able to become a lawyer and knew nothing about the Holocaust. What kind of education did she obtain? How was it possible that she wasn't interested in her parent's history? Even if they were Roman Catholics.
   Book is full of historical errors (Warsaw was captured within hours, it was safer to be a Pole in the streets a Lvov during the German invasion)
   It bothered me that the street names were Misspelled (Owacowa instead of Owocowa, Mariacki Platz insead of Plac Mariacki)
   The story itself was very interesting. I wish however it was written by her parents.



5. This is one of my favorite books of all time. It is a real eye opener even after years of hearing, learning, and reading about the Holocaust. I plan to read it again.

5 comments about Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story.

1. The story of Polish Jews who were lucky enough not to be sent directly to the death camps, yet unlucky enough not to make it onto Schindler's list or find some other long-term refuge. Writing mostly about her mother's family as they lived for six years on the precipice, Kirschner produces something amazing: an important piece of scholarship that never feels like a historical tome. Rather, it stands on its own as a deeply moving, character-based story that will leave you wanting to revisit passages about remarkably brave and beautiful people -- some survivors, some not -- who were nearly forgotten by history. Despite Kirschner's proximity to the story, she never forces herself into the narrative; rather, she weaves personal elements into the story only when they can add a new and critical dimension. The result is a book that deserves to be dog-eared and passed around repeatedly.



2. Ann Kirschner meticulously weaves the story of her mother's survival with the overwhelming accounts of the Holocaust...a fine balance between biography and history lesson.



3. This is a very moving tribute written by a daughter about her mother. It is also well-researched and well-written, shedding new light on the movement of mail through work camps and even concentration camps. Sala's story of survival and redemption is remarkable, and the reader can well imagine the emotional roller-coaster the author must have experienced uncovering her mother's story.



4. I was so moved by this book I will include share my heartfelt comments to the author.
   Just want to THANK YOU for such an amazing book! Your decision to share your mothers personal life with readers who benefit so from your investment of labor and emotion is generous and to be admired! When you were complete it must have looked like E=Mc squared did to Einstein! Simple on the surface with the complexity of the universes author within. My highest regards to you and Sala Kirschner.
   Glenn from Tampa Fl and sometimes Lake Tahoe Nv



5. I picked this book, figuring it would be an interesting read. It is, hands down, one of the best books I have read regarding the Holocaust. What a wonderful book! Where other books have let me down, this book did not. It is a must read.

3 comments about The Diary of Petr Ginz.

1. A very thought provoking account of the holocaust. At such a young age Petr inspires through his art, poetry, boyish nature and keenness to learn. Such a clever boy could have grown to be an amazing man and no doubt, if given the opportunity, would have contributed a lot to the world. Unfortunately he was murdered at Auschwitz at age 16 so we are left to a two year snippet of life as he saw it.
   
   His account of Prague during the occupation is very matter of fact, which is very poignant in itself, as it seems almost a natural state of being to Petr. His diary provides a unique insight into the systematic erosion of his rights and the rights of the Jewish community, and the seemingly endless transportation of his friends and family.
   
   Sad and cruel. But I'm glad the diary was uncovered and I was able to experience it is such a small way.



2. This book must be read by both young and old. It will touch your heart and soul. I was moved to tears many times while reading.



3. In reading numerous Holocaust accounts, one is struck especially by the tragic loss of young lives, who had yet to experience the richness of life...Petr Ginz is one such soul. The Diary of Petr Ginz is a chronicle of a 14 year-old boy's day-to-day life under Nazi occupation in Prague. The entries themselves are brief, but are accompanied by Petr's poetry and illustrations, a testament to this young boy's talent, and resilient spirit. His diary chronicles his life between 1941-1942, and ends in Aug 1942, prior to his being deported to Thereisienstadt where he was incarcerated for two years before being sent to a tragic end at the Auschwitz death camp. One can't help but feel a sense of impotent rage at the Nazi monsters that robbed so many innocent souls of a life meant to be lived, especially at the senseless killing of ones so young, and in Petr's case, and many others, possessing such talent that would have enriched the world. This is a remarkable diary, in the vein of the diary of Anne Frank, and other Holocaust diaries that prove the resilience of the human spirit during a dark period in history.