A good complement to Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, Primo Levi’s The Truce, and other accounts of wartime dislocation.
A sharply observed account of war behind the Russian lines from an accidental observer.
Czapski (1896-1993) had the misfortune of being caught between larger armies at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact that divided his country. Thousands of his Polish comrades were executed in the Katyn Forest, an atrocity that he investigated after the war; for his part, he and thousands of other soldiers were sent to the gulag deep inside Russia. When Germany attacked Russia, Czapski and his fellows were freed to join the Allies, but their newly constituted Polish army had to get across the Soviet Union and into territory occupied by friendlier allies. His account of how they made their way to Iran and then to British-occupied Iraq makes up the heart of this book, reporting on things seen and heard along the way as well as on life in the camp: “There was never enough medicine, as in these circumstances even quite large stocks ran out at lightning speed.” Along the way, Soviet agents took away officers of the command, some, it was said, to staff an alternate version of the army for an occupied postwar Poland, but some for other purposes: “Studying Lenin, and one or another, more or less sincere or calculated game with the Bolsheviks, had not been of any help to that dear, lost boy.” The author sees things through an artist’s eyes, sometimes offering arresting images, sometimes simply chronicling the destruction of the Eastern European art world between two brands of totalitarianism (“his synthetic sculptures of cats and birds were worthy of Brancusi,” he writes of one long-forgotten comrade) and its replacement with something else: “I did not see a single picture that wasn’t atrocious or hopelessly mediocre,” he writes of the rising wave of socialist realist art. His reports are astonishing portraits of life in wartime Russia, when many anti-communist Russians welcomed the Nazi invaders and were only too glad to participate in ethnic cleansing.
A good complement to Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, Primo Levi’s The Truce, and other accounts of wartime dislocation.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-256-3
Page Count: 460
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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