Survivor’s tales come in as many shapes as mothers. This one, from the dark side, is as affecting as a kick in the stomach.
Mothers come in all shapes and persuasions: this one enthusiastically joined the Waffen SS, abandoned her children, and embraced her tasks at Auschwitz, as gloomily recounted in her daughter’s memoir.
Frau Mutti Schneider left her family in 1941, when Helga was four years old. Duty called: “Did I support the final solution? Why do you think I was there? For a holiday?” These words confront the author as she makes a last visit (only the second since 1941) to her mother, now living in a nursing home, shrunken and ancient at 90. “Senile and pathetic, cruel and romantic,” muses her daughter. “That was how Himmler’s blackshirts were, including women like herself, the SS in skirts.” Their final encounter includes moments of tenderness and pity on Schneider’s part—she is still, reluctantly, helplessly, a daughter, and that matters—but they are swamped by the utter venality of her mother’s words. “The fourth crematorium at Birkenau had no ovens . . . all it had was a big well filled with hot embers. The new commandant in Auschwitz found it terribly amusing.” Frau Schneider is touchy and arrogant, mocking in her selective recall; she drops bombshells of memory. “You were stubborn and disobedient,” she tells her daughter. “You were clever and rebellious. And you used to like hopping on one leg.” Schneider dissolves, moaning, “She can twist me around her little finger.” But not so fast. A violent sense of reality slaps the author awake, and she remembers she has made this hurtful rendezvous to discover some arc of meaning in her mother’s acts. But Mutti’s dehumanization training endures: “Well, my daughter, like it or not, I have never regretted being a member of the Waffen SS, is that clear?” It’s as awful as that.
Survivor’s tales come in as many shapes as mothers. This one, from the dark side, is as affecting as a kick in the stomach.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1435-8
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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