1 comments about Strangers in Their Own: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today.

1. At the time this book was published in 1987, there were about 35,000 Jews in Germany, most of whom were children of Holocaust survivors. (Today, there are also quite a few Eastern European Jews who came after the Berlin Wall came down). Later, when I myself visited Germany in 1997, I had many conversations similar to those in this book.

   "I'm proud to live with my family in Germany as a religious Jew," writes one contributor. "My bags are always packed," writes another. Between these two extremes of comfort and fear, there's a wide spectrum of feelings about what it is like to be a Jew in Central Europe today. These are 14 testimonials from German Jews, not as the public would like to see them, but how they feel in private, in the depths of their hearts and souls. A troubling, thought-provokng book that is hard to read, but impossible to put down.

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

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



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

No comments about Looking Backward: True Stories from Chicago's Jewish Past.

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

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

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

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

   Peculiarly, Pahor hardly mentions his own Jewishness.

No comments about Lots of Lehmans: The Family of Mayer Lehman of Lehman Brothers.

2 comments about Who's Who in the Talmud.

1. I love this book. It is well written and researched and is a wonderful gateway to more research into the world of Talmud.



2. Who's Who in the Talmud is a terrific resource for the Talmud scholar or beginning student. Virtually every quoted figure in the Talmud is listed alphabetically and each reference describes when the figure lived, family relationships, students and teachers, where he or she is mentioned in the Talmud, and some significant stories or sayings. The research even cross references such sources as Josephus.

   Orthodox readers should not be put off by the fact that this book is written by a woman. Mrs. Frieman is a distinguished graduate of Beth Jacob of Jerusalem Teachers College and a Suma Cum Laude graduate of Touro College. She comes from a distinguished rabbinic family and is involved in kiruv (outreach) work with her husband, Rabbi Gil Frieman.

   This book should not be confused with a much smaller work published more than 30 years ago by other authors. Mrs. Frieman's work is far more comprehensive.

5 comments about A Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara : Hero of the Holocaust (Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara: a Hero of the Holocaust).

1. A Special Fate is the story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consulate to Lithuania who, against the wishes of his superiors, hand wrote about six thousand transit visas to Jews fleeing the invading Nazi forces. His bravery saved many lives, but cost him not only his political career but also his youngest son's life. The author also weaves the story of two Jewish children who received visas from Sugihara into the main narrative.
   
   The book is very engaging, not at all like the dry lists of dates that typically pass for history. I usually don't find history books enjoyable, but I enjoyed this one and learned a lot, not only about how Sugihara's visas saved so many people, but also a bit about Japanese culture.
   
   The story moves quickly enough to keep younger readers from getting bored, but not so fast that the details are lost. Most older children will be able to read the book and understand what is going on as long as they have a basic knowledge of W.W.II history.
   
   I would recommend this book to anyone learning about W.W.II, and even though it is supposedly a children's book, I would recommend it to adults too.



2. Chiune Sugihara's story needed to be told. In a dark period of Japanese history, one man listened to his conscience, discussed the consequences with his wife and children, and chose to do the right thing. In the early days of WWII, Sugihara, a diplomat to Lithuania, issued thousands of life-saving visas to the Jews of Europe against the direct orders of his superiors. After the Russians took over Lithuania, Sugihara was forced to close the Japanese Embassy, but he continued writing visas until the last possible moment.

   The rest of Sugihara's story is anti-climactic, dealing with his diplomatic career throughout the war. After the war, the Soviets sent the Sugihara family to a Siberian detention camp. When they were finally repatriated, Sugihara was immediately dismissed from government service for disobeying orders. He spent many years in obscurity before finally being found by some of the grateful Jews that he had saved. Near the end of his life, he received some well-deserved acknowledgement by both the Japanese and Israeli government including being recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations."

   Alison Leslie Gold, who has written several other non-fiction books of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, tells the story of three families. Besides Sugihara's story, Gold describes the experience of a Jewish family from Poland and another from Lithuania who received Sugihara visas. Gold focuses on Solly and Masha, children from those families. She interviewed them as well as Sugihara's widow, Yukiko, for first hand accounts of the heroic and tragic events described in this book. Masha's family used their visa to travel to Japan and survived the war. Tragically, Solly's family repeatedly delayed using their visa until it was too late to use it resulting in many family members' deaths at the hands of the Nazis. Solly found it quite ironic that a Japanese man tried to offer his family assistance at the beginning of the war and the first American face that he saw when he was liberated at the end of the war was a Japanese American soldier.

   The photographs in the book help readers understand that this is a true story that happened to real people. There are photographs of all three families and additional photos from the time period. The photos are separated from the narrative in two clumps. Though this distracts from their impact, they are still powerful.

   This is an easy to read introductory book on the incidents in Lithuania. However, I found information on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum web site that was not included in the book. In the web site's section on Sugihara, I learned about the interesting larger story involving the Dutch council, Jan Zwartendijk and his involvement in helping the Lithuanian Jews. I also learned that Yukiko was Sugihara's second wife.

   Gold is non-judgmental towards Japan's involvement in WWII and of Sugihara's father's involvement in occupied Korea. However, she seems to lose some of that impartiality when she adds comments on Sugihara's conversion to Russian Orthadoxism. She adds the comment that he did not forget his Buddhism and Shinto religions from his youth (10). I wonder how she knows that detail of his conversion.

   The research that went into A Special Fate could have been better documented. Gold's sources are summed up in an author's note at the beginning of the book and an author's acknowledgement at the end. The book does not include a bibliography for further reading or works consulted.

   It is estimated that Sugihara wrote 6,000 visas. Now there is a group numbering over 40,000 descendants known as "Sugihara Survivors." Even in later life, Sugihara remained a humble man and once said, "I didn't do anything special....I made my own decisions....I followed my own conscience and listened to it" (175). Yukiko also should be commended, because had she dissuaded her husband, he might not have written the visas that saved so many lives. Karen Woodworth-Roman, MS Library Science




3. Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara is one of the little known heroes of the Holocaust. This is rather unfortunate, as Mr. Sugihara was probably responsible for the saving of more Jews than any other individual! While serving as Japanese Vice Consul in Lithuania in 1940, Mr. Sugihara, against the express orders of his government, issued some 6,000 visas to people (individuals and families) desperately seeking to avoid the Nazi death machine. This book is the story of Chiune Sugihara, from youth to honored old age, and also the story of two young Jews, one whose parent took the visa and ran, and one whose parent waited too long.

   This is a great and exciting story! I got this book for my twelve-year-old daughter, but found that I liked it just as much as she did. I really enjoyed this story of one man standing up and doing what was right, in spite of the costs. If you are looking for an uplifting story, one that teaches an invaluable lesson, then I highly recommend that you get this book!




4. Alison Gold has documented with elegance the selfless humanity of Sempo Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat of the World War II era. Against the orders of his superiors, Mr. Sugihara wrote 6,000 visas in an effort to spare the lives of Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Through Alison Gold's brilliantly crafted accounts, we learn of the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust, of the mixed fates of several families who were granted visas, and of the injustices to which the Sugihara family was subjected as a result of Sempo's courageous response to human torment. In several places throughout this magnificent book, Ms. Gold introduces Japanese phrases that do much to enrich our understanding of cultural concepts at the core of the Sugihara's way of thinking and living. We learn of the considerable influence that Mrs. Sugihara had on her husband's decisions. While this book was written for a young adult audience, most adults would find its content engrossing.



5. This is a beautiful book. I had to check the total number of pages after the first 10 pages, because I knew I would want to read the whole book in one sitting. "Hands reaching... for visas for life." Some people had never seen a Japanese person before. We hear the ice on rivers breaking up with loud cracking, we taste the Lithuanian pancakes with cheese filling and jam, we experience the shock of watching an American movie to then walk out into the light and see Russian tanks rolling down the street. The writer carries us gently through a lot of history, pain and beauty. I thought this would be a depressing book about the Holocaust, I was very wrong.

No comments about Life on a high note: The Philip Belz story.

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

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



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



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



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



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

1 comments about Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century.

1. This encyclopedia contains one- thousand word entries on three-hundred and thirty Jewish writers. I have read sample entries, and from them have a great deal of enthusisam about the book. In two of these entries Sorrel Kerbel, the editor and one of the many contributors to the volume interviews Anita Brookner and Cynthia Ozick. She incorportates their remarks in the overview she provides of their work. What I especially liked about this feature was that she asked them how they felt about their Jewishness and the part it played in their writing. Brookner was escapist and defensive. Kerbel however shows how strong an element her Jewishness is in the sensibility of her always slightly alienated - from- British- society characters. Ozick in opposite speaks about the Torah and the Jewish text as at the center of Western Literature.
   Each entry on a particular author also contains bibliography of their work, and suggestions for further reading.
   This seems to me a vital work for every Jewish Library.