A courageous, surprisingly buoyant memoir from one of modern history’s most somber eras.
The author energetically chronicles his life as a young Jew living underground in Nazi Germany.
Born in Berlin of Russian immigrant parents, the 20-year-old Schönhaus saw his entire family deported to concentration camps in 1942. His own deportation was temporarily deferred due to his “voluntary” employment at an arms factory, where other Jews taught him to sabotage German gun barrels to prevent them from firing. The former graphic-arts student was then hired by prominent and heroic Jewish sympathizers to forge identity passes. He eventually used his talent to counterfeit hundreds of cards and passports for Jews threatened with deportation to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Schönhaus’s intelligent, engaging voice truly emerges in the second half of the book, where he describes his adventures as a Jew living under the Gestapo radar. He adopted the wildlife survival tactic of mimicry, determining that the more he acted like a swaggering German, the less likely anyone was to suspect that he was an illegal Jew—and the longer he would stay alive to aid the persecuted. Encouraged by memories of his father’s wisdom, Schönhaus lived like an apparent Prussian prince, dining in high-class restaurants, learning to sail, falling in and out of love. He resourcefully continued to frustrate the Gestapo, who posted his wanted photo all over Berlin. Heavy on adventure and light on violence, this brand of Holocaust memoir frees the author to voice the raw, poignant questions that Jews outside the camps pondered: “Would you have a toothbrush there?... Surely my vision of white huts was wrong. Where was Mama now? What had she been forced to see?” The climax delivers both structurally and emotionally, as Schönhaus tosses his bicycle in the bushes to swim the rest of the way to freedom in Switzerland, where he still lives.
A courageous, surprisingly buoyant memoir from one of modern history’s most somber eras.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7867-2058-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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