2 comments about Hess: The Fuhrer's Disciple.

1. The standard and obligatory questions about Rudolf Hess are: did he fly to Scotland with Hitler's knowledge? Was he crazy during the Nuremberg trials and afterwards as well, and was he murdered? If you're insane or hopelessly ill-informed, you might also throw in the question whether he ever had a double. Unfortunately, Padfield asks these questions but is too ill-equipped historically to answer them. He is totally out of his depth here and it shows. He relies on Wolf Hess' testimony on many things when he needs to examine the historical record instead. The overwhelming abundance of evidence shows that Hess flew to Scotland in 1941 without the Fuehrer's knowledge, that he was perfectly sane throughout his life (though eccentric) and that the notion of him having a "double" is ludicrous.

   This book is not especially well-written and contains almost nothing new. The autopsy photos of Hess are revealing but hardly show "conclusively" that he was murdered. There is very little material on Hess' long confinement at Spandau, nor about his early life. His relationship with Hitler is not explored adequately with the possible exception of their time in Landsberg prison. In short, a disappointment.




2. The first casualty in war - truth. Without it there will always be plenty of scope for the Violets, Roses, Gilberts, Manchesters, Irvings et al. A well focused study, difficult to put down once under way. Of course, no satisfactory conclusion, leaving me wondering whether I'll be around in 2017, and will the world then know the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I very much doubt it.

No comments about Animal Triste.

No comments about Mi corazón herido.

No comments about Displaced German Scholars: A Guide to Academics in Peril in Nazi Germany During the 1930s (Studies in Judaica and the Holocaust, No 7).

2 comments about Sala, More Than a Survivor.

1. "Sala" is different from most available survivor stories for two reasons. First, its subject was only ten years old when she was taken away. Most accounts we have deal with older survivors, whereas Sala basically grows up in a concentration camp and is one of the few children that age to survive, adding a new perspective. Secondly, this book doesn't end with her liberation from the Nazis, but chronicles Sala living a full life despite a past that would make many give up. True stories like this are invaluable to our history, and Marsha Cook writes it eloquently.



2. Sometimes it is nice to read the story of someone who has been there. Not fictionalized, not historical, just a person who after reading thier story you know you can relate to. This story is short and simple during an age of incomprehensible legnth and complexity.
   This book is a great buy, especially to share with young adults.

No comments about Defying the Tide: An Account of Authentic Compassion During the Holocaust.

No comments about Rebel With a Cause.

No comments about Journey Through the Night: Jakob Littner's Holocaust Memoir.

1 comments about The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary.

1. When you see the title and subtitle, you might expect an unrelentingly grim report--so unfortunately familiar from the genre of accounts by Holocaust survivors. Instead, after reading Erno Szep's story a few weeks spent digging trenches in a slave labor camp, you close the book not weary of a cheerless tale, but wishing you could have found out more--especially after Szep returned to Budapest just in time for the Soviet siege and the Nazi/Arrow Cross defense. In a series of very brief episodes, he relates with all the detail he can bear his view of the Jews in Budapest as most of its "able" men first were rounded up, then sent off to work under the sneers and beatings of the Arrow Cross. He conveys vividly the feel of forced labor and little food, the monotony, the damp, and the hunger increasing as their supplies and energy dwindle and the toil takes its toll.

   Unlike some other Hungarian translations of texts, this one by John Batki, a scholar who left Hungary as a teenager, manages to render into very colloquial but never casual English what must be marvelous Magyar prose. Szep's style evidently is cosmopolitan, with a snap and joie de vivre that persists despite his subject matter. Imagine a less taciturn, more convivial counterpart to Primo Levi. My only withholding of a fifth star in the rating: a stereotypically verbose and clumsily experimental preface by Dezso Tandori that reminds me of the worst of translated Hungarian stylists too enamoured of their own cleverness to remember their reader's attention span. Stick with Szep's own "autobiographical statement" and Batki's remarks. How I wish Szep had written much more! (1884-1953)

   Parts of his story shed new light on old events: the process by which were extended, denied, and re-extended passes by the Swedish (although Raoul Wallenberg's not mentioned by name--perhaps postwar Hungarian censorship may have been a factor?) and Spanish embassies; the fate of those who had grown up entirely Christian by birth and belief but had Jewish grandparents; the more recent converts hoping the excape the yellow star; and the printers. In this last vignette, Szep wonders why that largely socialist union, in WWI, allowed its members to produce so much propaganda for the capitalists. If they had simply refused to print the disortions of the ruling class, Szep muses, perhaps war would have been averted. Hmmm.

No comments about From Anschluss to Albion.