5 comments about Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe.

1. I just finished this book, I coulnt beleive the outcome of it.It was so shocking to hear all of this. I couldn't put it down. Im very interested in the Holocaust, even though im not a surviver, but it is so interesting on how people were back in WWII, it amazes me that people had to go through all of this..I would diffently reccommend this. Thanks to Leo and Michael, to share such a tragic story and a big and unhumian peice of your life, a peice of history..Best Wishes



2. I've read several books about the holocaust,whether their authors were survivors of the death camps, survivors on the run, or even non-Jews who helped others survive by hiding them. This book was an incredible story. His escapes were brave and amazing. I'm always looking for more stories such as this, it is amazing to me, there are so many stories, I want to know them all. If you have any other recommendations, e-mail me at Stacy1212@aol.com. Great book, must read.



3. The part that most struck me was when he wrote "Before the war would end, little Austria would supply nearly half of the staff of all Nazi concentration camps and death camps." and the story he tells of being a boy in Vienna in March 1938 "when Hitler entered the city and found a quarter of a million people rapturously cheering him". He says his cousin Sonja still lives in Vienna "where the citizens now call themselves victims....hoping to keep their secret from the rest of the world". Hitler was an Austrian and so was the head of the Gestapo Kaltenbrunner and many many other Nazi's.



4. Well, the writer is my Grandpa. I am 10 years old so I read it early. My mom helped me out a lot. But thats not exactly a bad thing! Everytime I came to a word I didn't know she would tell me. My mom really could help because my mom was even the one who read it and edited it so she was one of the first, and that really helped because she knew the whole story. I first thought it wasn't such a bad tradgedy of what he did, but after I accually read it, I really changed my mind! If you have not read it, you really got to. Even if you are ten like me, try and you will really like it! Expeccially read it if you like biographies and autobiographies, cause this is an autobiography! Even if you don't like non-fiction, read it anyway! This is so cool that it sounds impossible, and im it sounds impossible it's as fiction as any other book!



5. an incredible story about the human spirit and the will to live against all odds.

3 comments about Auschwitz and After.

1. I have never read a book on the topic of the Holocaust that grasped it quite as well as this one has. Other books make the Holocaust sound 'too good' compared to her stories and accounts that are portrayed in this book. If you want to get a real grasp or feel of the Holocaust experience in a poetic and creatively written path, then this is a book you should read. Also, for anybody interested in the Holocaust, this is a definite must. It is basically as true and real as an account on the Holocaust can possibly get. It is simply an amazing piece of work.



2. This book is a translation of the famous postwar trilogy of Charlotte Delbo, a French Resistance fighter who was caught and sent to Auschwitz, then transferred to Ravensbruck. She was, and is, quite well-known in France. Though she is now deceased, the translator, Rosette Lamont, knew Delbo personally and is the foremost expert on her work, having written a number of articles on Delbo. Another who has written sensitively about Delbo is Nathan Bracher. Like all translations, there is a little something lost in the English rendering. If you are able to read the French, the original titles are "Aucun de nous ne reviendra," "Une connaissance inutile," and "Mesure de nos jours." Other books by Delbo you might find interesting are "La Memoire et les Jours," and "Le convoi du 24 janvier." She also wrote a number of plays, and poetry that isn't in this trilogy.

   Thanks to the work of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, the Survivors of the Shoah project by Steven Spielberg, and the efforts of the new National Holocaust Museum, there is no shortage of testimony from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi regime, and there is surprisingly little testimony from non-Jewish survivors. Delbo is probably the only non-Jewish victim who became an important literary figure in the postwar era, and her position as victim along with her eloquent indictment of Christianity and Christian culture for their complicity in the extermination of the Jewish victims with whom she feels strong kinship and empathy make her work an absolutely unique contribution to post-Holocaust literature. Feel free to e-mail me at schnaibl@fas.harvard.edu for more bibliographical references.




3. The other two reviews are so insightful and accurate, in my opinion, I should have little to add. Yet, after reading "Auschwitz and After", I felt I had to express something of how the book made me understand and grow. As a convert to Judaism (born in 1951, I was on the pathway my whole life, I realize now), I have read many, many books/memoirs/histories on the Holocaust. Many of them have been very moving, indeed, beginning with Anne Frank's Diary, on through to "Maus". Though I acknowledge that these words have been said before, I still believe that Charlotte Delbo's words put me into that Hell more than any other survivor's testimony to date. Delbo's words do more than say "this happened and that happened". They are poetry...yet how can poetry apply to any experience in a death camp? Surprisingly, scarily, the poetry transports the reader there more truly than any film, any historical analysis, even better than any well-written survivor account. At first I thought I would not like it; my sensibilities were offended that someone would write in poetic format about an experience at a death camp ("Maus" was different; it was a cartoon, yes, but drawn by the son of a survivor, not a survivor). After finishing Delbo's triology, I feel that her words (not all in poetic form) made me understand as much as anyone who did not experience a death camp, how it felt, how one survived, what one endured when one "came back" to the "real world".

   Due to the passage of time, we are losing the remaining Holocaust survivors. Hence, Spielberg's and others' efforts to record the testimony before it is too late. There has been more attention lately paid to the children of the survivors' and how their parents' experiences affected their lives. Delbo's words transcend the words of one survivor - she really makes the reader understand what happned to those who "came back", how little they had to give, in some cases, to their spouses, to their children. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "getting over, moving on". To some extent, I believe this is usually a healthy thing to try to do; but some experiences fall outside the realm of being able to "get over it". I would suggest that some experiences are so traumatic that one cannot "process" them and get over them. How is forgiveness possible when the entire world is affected as a result? Some experiences mark a person and maybe a culture permanently, and to deny or to try to repress this is unhealthy. At the end of their lives now, most published Holocaust testimonies report that the death camp experience "never leaves you" - something "survivors" probably didn't believe when they were first liberated. The fact that the Holocaust survivors are becoming fewer and fewer makes Delbo's book all the more important because it conveys the true horror, the true evil of human degradation and genocide - and explains why the Holocaust, as well as other genocides have and will reverberate from generation to generation. Her book made me realize that understanding and vigilance, not "processing" and forgiveness is the answer.

5 comments about A Bag of Marbles.

1. this book made me want to read more. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time. You are really rooting for the boys to come out of this entire oredeal alright.+



2. This is a beautiful book that tells the true story of two young Jewish boys on the run from the Gestapo in war-torn France. The author, Joseph Joffo is never nostalgic about the ordeal he and his brother went through in their bid to escape the Death Camps of Nazi Germany. He writes from the heart but he writes with purpose. His story is a warning to future generations never to take their lives for granted. A Bag of Marbles is a fantastic book that should be on the shelves of every school in the world, just to remind future generations that life is not always a bed of roses...



3. Kudos to the translator for keeping the author's words & spirit in tact in this heroic and moving testimonial about what it took to survive the Holocaust & what we all must do to keep other holocausts from happening again. In his own words, "be brave, know how to take care of yourself, don't rely on others, don't let your emotions get the better of you, take responsibility." Clearly, this title is a story that will encourage & remind young readers to always remember and to take responsibility.



4. The story is about two young boys : Joe and Maurice, they are French and Jews, it's in Paris during world War 2. So they must avoid. they went to the south, near the Italian border.
   The story is touching and well writing, but sometimes it's very boring, because there isn't a lot of action.



5. A bag of marbles was pretty good. If you are looking for an educational book about wwII and want to escape the gore, this is the book for you. It gets a little slow, but you really do find yourself caring for theses two boys. Plus, it is non-fiction.

5 comments about At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities.

1. This man, who lived caught between paralyzing fear and paralyzing anger, refuses to countenance the immoral world he found so horribly crude, ignorant and inadequate. I know of no more unrelenting self-criticism or self-asceticism than portrayed here in this work.

   Every "outsider" will recognize immediately that the author talks to him/her. No matter by what standard one is taken as an outsider, here is a priceless analysis of your experience, writ humbly, clearly and painfully.

   Every "moralist" will recognize immediately the accusations the authors aims in your direction with too-precise accuracy that will not allow you to wriggle free of the dread implications.

   Every "religionist" will recognize the futility of responding in comforting platitude to the undeniable evidence of evil writ hugely in this thin volume.

   I know of few intellectuals who will receive the meaning of this work with welcome. To almost all others, it will be set aside with well-explained rationalizations...

   But for the reader who knows what "outside" means, what "cataclysm" means, and what "torment" of any stripe whatsoever means, then here you will find a comrade. Here you will find words of encouragement to struggle on...your lot is not as bad as it could be, after all...for here we find our comrade who has endured to the very limits of the mind. And survives, with bright intellect intact and sharp. Uncomfortably so.

   A note on the "Auswitz" in the title--Don't allow this word to dissuade you from the universal human experience that is the focus of this work. Any and every human being can take an enhanced image of life and world from this resource.




2. Ever since writing a term paper on Amery's "At the Mind's Limits", I have continuously come back to this work. There is a lifetime's worth of contemplation to survey here, not that this is an autobiography or even a complete memoir, but the years of his life on which he writes and the experiences dissected provoke a lifetime's worth of questions, mostly unanswered.
   
   I think of this work as a distinct and great existential accomplishment. It provokes the reader to empathize while simultaneously making him question or even feel guilty for such empathy. How can an intellect, in the modern west at least, empathize with one who has experienced dehumanization to such an unimaginable degree? The short answer is that to try to do so is impossible and even probably detestable, morally speaking.
   
   But isn't the motivation of Amery's expression the prevention of such dehumanization in future? And isn't such prevention dependent on empathetic attempts at least (among other things)?
   
   These are unanswerable contradictions for the reader. But the introspective applications make this a necessary book to read over and over again.



3. Prior to reading Amery's book, I thought of myself as thoroughly read in what one French scholar has called "the writing of the disaster," but Amery's may be among the half dozen essential texts in the now overwhelming body of Holocaust literature. A profound meditation on language, on mind, and on disaster in the 20th century.



4. Of all the Holocaust books, this book stands above the rest, with the content focused not on the gory details of Nazi atrocities (which are by themselves worth reading if you want to validate the experiences of those who suffered), but rather on the psychological implications of being a victim. Only books by Primo Levi contain this degree of depth of thought and introspection.



5. Amery did not only pick up a new French-sounding name, but (although this book was originally written in German) apparently also the circumlocutionary style of the French. If you like a book full of idle verbiage, with arguments beginning nowhere and leading nowhere, and references to passé writers such as Sartre, then this book is for you.
   
   But it's not merely the style that I disliked. All essays (rants, more like) gravitate around Amery's pathological hate for all Germans, past and present. All Germans, except for some four individuals he mentions by name, are inherently bad. Nazis all of them, and torture is the essence of their being. Amery is dissatisfied with the world, because after the war, Germany was not permanently turned into a potato patch as the Morgenthau plan had envisaged it. A typical only child, Amery seems to think that the world should turn around his personal sufferings and frustrations. He hardly ever speaks of his fellow prisoners, and if he does, he belittles them because they are not interested in, let alone able to quote Liliencron or other poets Any Intellectual Should Know. Finally, as could be expected, the post-war generation of Germans is bad, because they do not want to permanently crawl in the dust before Amery.
   
   I regret having spent money on this book.

5 comments about Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943.

1. Marion Samuel was eleven years old when she arrived at Auschwitz in March of 1943, she was gassed to death the same day and her body burned in the crematorium. He ashes were thrown into a pit with hundreds of others and then covered over with soil. Their is no marker over where she died.
   
   But who was this child and what was her crime that she should be treated so. She came from a lower middle class family from West Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea where the German-Polish border is today. At the age of six she was a witness to Kristallnacht and forbidden to go to the German Public School she had attended for the last three years. He family lost their business and both her parent's became "unskilled" factory workers. Marion was able to go to a "Jewish" school for two more years, before those were shut down. For the last years of her life she lived in a one room ground floor apartment off an alley. Since her parent's were away each day, she had to fill her time as best she could.
   
   How did she view the world she lived in? Did she wonder why she and her parents were being treated the way they were? Did she have any understanding that she was being punished for a random act of birth? At least we know she was on the same train as her father (who lasted sixty one days in the camp) when she was "evacuated". Thankfully, the horrors at the end for this little girl were tempered by the comfort of a parent.
   
   Hopefully, the people that ordered her death, and carried it out, suffered for what they did.



2. This is a book could've been written by Sophie Scholl, from the White Rose Movement, from heaven-almighty.
   
   I cannot bequeath the tragic nature of how I came to understand this "statistic" but in all due seriousness, why not a statistical analysis of the nearly 2 million dead or wounded, you have to remember, that Iraq and Aftanistan, although it maims, scars and is a horrifying Nazi conquest, particularly Iraq, the Holy Roman Empire lives on, just as the slaughter continues, for all Buddhist protesters in Tibet, and anyone with half a brain, can figure this out: this book is a euphemism for the hatred that sparks wars and all sorts of pogroms, including that of being disabled, very similar to being Jewish, in Nazi Germany.
   
   I highly hated Hitler, until he dies, briefly, very briefly with enough time I have to commute across the internet to show my mother this beautiful book, but I hate him present-tense, as I have no money, to buy it for her.



3. this was a very moving book. I kept thinking during the book. how could anybody murder 1.5 million children and where were the alleged good people. why did not our country do a great deal more to save the jews of europe. the USA could have saved every jew in germany, austria and czechoslovakia if the state dept. had not been run by anti-semetic officials.



4. One of the abiding insights that comes through in Goetz Ally's Into the Tunnel is just how efficient bureaucracies can be at transforming vibrantly alive human beings into impersonal statistics on official forms. In their extermination program, the Nazis, with an eerie fidelity to record-keeping, felt the need to document every detail of the lives they were destroying. That's why Aly is able to trace the unhappy fate of the beautiful little girl, Marion Samuel, who is the protagonist of this unhappy tale.
   
   Such exercises are important; they help to keep memory alive. But Aly's book is more of a model of historical research than a sustained biography that captures who Marion Samuel was. This is as it must be. Nazi documentation records dates when the Samuel family loses its business, moves from one locale to another, and is rounded up for deportation to Auschwitz, but little else. There are few photographs left, and family memories on both Cilly's (Marion's mother) and Ernst's (her father) side have dimmed (or were outright obliterated by the Holocaust). So what we have in this book is a lot of data that leaves us with the sinking awareness that the 12-year old Marion simply disappeared in a wide ocean of bureaucratic files and forms even before she was murdered and incinerated at Auschwitz.
   
   Still, we get glimpses of her, and those glimpses are all the more poignant for being so incomplete. One of her schoolmates recalls that in 1938, a full five years before her murder, an 8-year old Marion was already feeling the burden of the Nazi horror. She remembers (p. 82) that at one point a near-hysterical Marion blurted out her fear that Jews were disappearing into an ominous tunnel. We also know that at the final roundup, Marion was separated for three full days from her parents, and sent to a detention warehouse full of equally parentless children. Marion's mother, Cilly, was sent on to Auschwitz and quite likely was immediately murdered. Marion and her father Ernst were reunited in the same transport that took them both to Auschwitz. One can only imagine the forlornness Marion experienced before she was reunited with her father for their final journey into the tunnel. Both were murdered a week later.
   
   It's good that Aly's work allows us to know something of a child, unspeakably murdered before she barely had a chance to live, who otherwise would've totally disappeared.



5. I'll read this book over and over, I am sure - three times already in a day and a half. The first time I tried to focus on the historical scholarship and impeccable method, but was distracted by thoughts of "But why? Why? It doesn't make sense. They were Germans too."
   
   Again I read it, and was arrested this time by the mechanistic system set up by the Nazis in what was really quite a short time. Every Jew's (and every other citizen's) address was on a card somewhere - every detail of their life was a part of a huge network by means of which all people of a certain category could be swept up with little or no warning with chilling efficiency, and sent away. Then their property was listed, valued, distributed to 'more deserving' citizens, and the state itself recovered every last drop of value from those it had discarded - down to retrieving their security deposits from the gas and electricity companies to be paid into general revenue. Those companies even printed for their own use forms for particularising the amount of the deposit, any unrecovered bills, and any remainder to be sent to the State.
   
   Then, at the third attempt little Marion and her family took all my attention, despite my efforts to resist them, and I wept. This book is quite accessible to any general reader, and Marion Samuel, thanks to the efforts of Gotz Aly, could take her place beside Anne Frank in the lists of books for young folk to read, for slightly different reasons. Anne Frank shows us her own growth and maturity, as well as the effect on others of the horror outside their hiding place. Marion's story is not in her won words, but it shows starkly the power a state apparatus can gather to itself and use to crush parts of its population it takes a dislike to. Would that there had been more of the kind of German described in "Into the tunnel" when a young girl was told forcefully by her father that the sight of Jews being deported was something that struck home at all other Germans, because it could be Catholics like their family next.

2 comments about The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59.

1. I was excited to read the rest of his life and journal : I do like a lot how he writes. I do not like at all, all the editorial cuts and even less when they felt they have to remplace it with a cold short story "what was cut" altering a lot the flow of reading.
   
   Or it was not important, and they could have put (...) like elsewere, or they should have left it there. His journals are so important, I am so sorry that I cannot read German, where they are twice as long. Already, the second wife cut some from his words, now the editors and the translators. Really pity !



2. Victor Klemperer's The Lesser Evil completes his three volume diary as a Jewish college professor in Germany from 1933 to 1959. In this volume, he covers the years from the end of the Second World War until his final illness and to my mind provides the most rewarding literary experience. To be sure, his account of the tightening Nazi noose following Hitler's ascension to power and the horrors and restrictions of the war years as a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman have few equals in Holocaust literature. Only the fire bombing of Dresden on the eve of a scheduled deportation of his city's remaining handful of Jews and their spouses allowed him to survive. But the post-war years provide the fascinating portrait of a genteel intellectual dedicated to the rule of reason (a major scholarly pursuit as a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature involves his work on the French Enlightenment) trying to balance between the resurgent militarism and consumerism of the triumphant western powers and the repression of a socialist German Democratic Republic, the title's "lesser evil" where he chooses to live. Klemperer is keenly aware of his own inconsistencies as a secular humanist with a deep appreciation of traditional spiritual values, often describing his situation as one of falling between the two chairs of the East-West confrontation that became the Cold War. In 1951, the grieving widower remarries within a year, feeling both guilt and gratitude and humbled by two women more talented and generous than himself. Hardly heroic, he manages to seem admirable as he struggles to keep afloat despite terrible times and petty academic politics.

5 comments about The Sergeant in the Snow.

1. I am shocked to find the great many people who are unaware of Mussollinni's ill-fated pursuit of glory in the east. His broken dreams left many Italian families orphaned and widowed. This well written account of the brutality of combat on the Eastern front is a fine addition to any WW2 eastern front library. It is well written and fascinating.



2. The words in the title are those of one of the author's close comrades-in-arms in the Tridentina Division, which had been attached to the Italian 8th Army on the western bank of the Don in 1942. In December of that year, the Romanians on the left flank of the Tridentines buckled under a strong Soviet offensive, and the Italians found themselves suddenly enveloped. Ordered to withdraw on 19 December, the Italians, along with Romanian and Hungarian remnants and remnants of the German 298th Infantry Division, marched west through icy wind, snowstorms and heavy drifts in an attempt to break out of the pocket. Sergeant in the Snow is a vivid first-person account of the story of this macabre odyssey up to the climactic Battle of Nikolajewka on 26 January 1943 and its aftermath.
   
   Rigoni's memoir is at once urgent, tragic, heroic and poetic. He relays the essence of the Italian spirit, so different from that of the stern and disciplined Germans, and recounts in flowing narrative and earthy dialogue exactly what it was like to march, hungry and exhausted, over 300 miles in the Russian winter. Rigoni divides his memoir into two parts: (1) the Strongpoint, wherein he tells the story of his division's struggle to repulse Soviet thrusts on the Don, and (2) the Bag, wherein he tells the story of the breakout from the pocket (the bag). As mentioned above, the climax of the action, and there is plenty of that here, takes place on the memorable 26th of January when the Italians and Germans defeat, at terrible cost, three Soviet divisions at Nikolajewka and finally break out of the encirclement: "My men hesitate, hold back, one or two of them are already wounded, and I shout: 'Come on.' I too hesitate a bit, but we're in it now, whatever happens."
   
   In the midst of battle chaos and the fog of war at Nikolajewka, one of those inexplicable and mysterious episodes occurs when the famished Rigoni enters an isba only to find a group of Russian soldiers there: "They're armed. With the red stars on their caps. My rifle's in my hand. I look at them, turned to stone. They're eating round a table, taking the food with a wooden spoon from a common bowl. And they look at me with their spoons held in mid-air....There are also some women. One takes a plate, fills it with milk and meal and offers it to me with a spoon from the common bowl....No one breathes a word. The only sound is of the spoon in my plate; and of each of my mouthfuls....The Russian soldiers watch me go out, without moving."
   
   Kudos to Northwestern University Press for bringing this remarkable book to light again. Unfortunately, the book is small and the print small, too. The translator's grammar and mechanics are somewhat archaic, and there is the glaring, almost unforgivable, absence of any maps. Dialogue should be rendered in alternating paragraphs as each character speaks, thus reducing the possibility of the reader's being confused. Although there are some footnotes along the way, this excellent memoir would certainly benefit from a thorough re-edit to include many more. In spite of these publishing flaws, The Sergeant in the Snow is a far better memoir than Guy Sajer's The Forgotten Soldier and as good as Bidermann's In Deadly Combat. Highly recommended.



3. very spontaneous and genuine story, of young people catapulted across Europe for no reason, and still performing their duties and trying to be human. you can rely feel the soldiers pain and the bitter russian winter with the words used by the author.



4. Mario Rigoni Stern's slim memoir of his World War Two experiences sheds light on the effective destruction of the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano (CSIR) in Russia, which is perhaps one of the lesser-known events of the Eastern Front and of the entire war itself. As a personal narrative, Stern's view is from the ground and he offers little or no strategic view of how these events came to pass. This however, adds to the book because as a grunt--even in a position roughly equivalent to an American platoon sergeant of today--he wouldn't have had much access to or inclination to see the war in such a manner.
   
   Plenty of combat abounds through the short tale. Particularly once Stern and his fellows realize the entire front is collapsing and that they're caught in a "bag," slang for encirclement by the Soviets, the fighting becomes fierce. It is interesting to read the accounts of Italians, Germans, Hungarians and other taking part together in desperate attacks to break out of the Axis Powers' first epic disaster on the Eastern Front.
   
   Throughout the book courses one vein of thought that is ever-present in Stern and his soldiers: survival. "Shall we ever get home?" one soldier asks of Stern every time he sees him. "Which direction is Italy in?" others asks from the middle of the frozen steppes. And as the situation deteriorates during the long retreat westwards, Stern constantly commands and reminds the men to "always stick together." Alas, as these memoirs always illustrate, many do not make it home.
   
   A short but good work covering the Italian experience in World War Two, Stern tells his tale of the Italian Army's fortunes as seen and lived through by one of its peasant and elite Alpini soldiers.



5. A slightly different perspective makes this novella unique. The thread of a soldier on the eastern front in the cold Russian winter is a common one but this time it is based on the memoirs of an Italian. A good and quick read.

5 comments about Mendel's Daughter: A Memoir.

1. I picked up Martin Lemelman's book, "Mendel's Daughter," and did not put it down until I had read through to the last page. The story is familiar, yet new--a testimony to the spirit, faith, and tenacity of those who did whatever they could, whatever they had to do to survive the atrocities of the Holocaust. Yet it is much more than a tale of survival or an account of the fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. It is a touching, poignant story of a family that although divided by circumstances, remains whole and committed to surviving, supporting each other, reuniting, and, throughout, holding tight to their beliefs and traditions. The beautiful artwork that pictorially weaves this tale brings the characters to life, and the reader cannot help but feel their pain and anguish, their struggle to survive, their love and their joy. The drawings, the photographs, and the text of "Mendel's Daughter" all combine to create a timeless memorial to a family, a people, and a period in our history that must never be forgotten or dismissed.



2. MENDEL'S DAUGHTER details the harrowing story of Martin Lemelman's mother and her family during the Holocaust. It is a story that Lemelman grew up knowing very little of. But in 1989, after his mother, Gusta, dropped a frozen chicken on her foot (causing it to be broken), Lemelman brought her to stay at his house in Pennsylvania. In part to curtail her efforts to do all of the cooking and cleaning at his house with her broken foot, and in part to have a family history that he would be able to pass along to his own children, Lemelman persuaded his mother to finally share her story. He wisely videotaped her. After her death a decade ago, he watched the recording, edited the story Gusta related by reorganizing it chronologically and augmenting her accounts with those of his Uncle Isia, who also survived. He then illustrated it with hundreds of drawings interspersed with actual documents and some little black and white photos his mother had saved from her childhood.
   
   Gusta Mendel grew up in a prosperous and well-regarded Jewish family in a portion of Poland that is now part of the Ukraine. This was a region that during World War II was invaded first by the Communists and then by the Nazis. We know from the outset of this memoir that this is a story of survival, that Gusta made it through the Holocaust. Following the historical and personal events that are depicted in this book, Gusta would eventually come to America and, with her husband, raise Lemelman and his brother in the back of their Brooklyn candy store.
   
   The rest of the Mendel family was murdered by the Nazis, but Gusta, Isia, Yetala, and another sibling, Simon, lived. The four siblings survived in the woods through two winters, digging themselves a series of underground shelters, burying the potatoes and sugarbeets they'd steal from fields in the middle of the night, and getting some help from a few people who were sympathetic to their plight.
   
   "For us, the war ended in March-April 1944.
   "Who could believe that the German army coming back to Germakivka would be the beginning of our liberation? This time, thanks God, they was coming from the East, running away from Russia."
   
   The result of Lemelman's labor of love is the real deal: an illustrated memoir which, while technically published as an adult book, will be incredibly approachable, engaging, and memorable to middle school and high school age readers.



3. Our book club read this wonderful book and everyone agreed (which was a miracle) that it was an amazing experience. From the lovely illustrations to "hearing" Gusta's voice, it was a totally memorable read. The author, Martin Lemelman, accepted our invitation to speak to our book club and he added even so much more to this story. His gentle manner was in direct contrast to the horrors of the stories he told us. Reading the book then having Martin speak to us about researching and writing it, was a definite highlight for all of us.



4. Martin Lemelman has created a beautiful memoir, with his mother's voice speaking to the reader (you can hear her adorable accent!) and tender drawings that recreate her life as a young Jewish girl in Ukraine, a life that was torn apart by Nazi invasion.
   
   I almost left this book on the shelf because - sometimes you don't want to hear another story like this. But one look at the pictures and I had to read it. I could see this book would not be like any graphic novel or any holocaust novel that I read before.
   
   Somehow you finish this book, despite the story, feeling unexpectedly happy. Why is that when there is so much sadness, when you expect only grief or rage? Well, on every page you can feel Lemelman's love for his mother and you just feel happy that this beautiful book was made for her, and that her story is shared with us.
   
   By the way, I was reading to see whether I might share this book with young people. If you find yourself beginning to approach the story of the Holocaust, I definitely recommend Mendel's Daughter.



5. I liked the book and its content and the drawings but in general I enjoy a book that has more of a story or history in in.

5 comments about Tramp for the Lord.

1. An excerpt of this book might say it all (from Chapter 5)...
   
   "A great ocean separated me from my homeland. I had no money. Nobody wanted to hear my lectures. All I had was an inner word from God that He was guiding me. Was it enough? All I could do was press on--and on--and on--for His Name's sake. Before going to sleep I opened my Bible, my constant companion. My eyes fell on a verse from the Psalms, "The Lord taketh pleasure...in those that hope in His mercy" (147:11). It was a thin web--a tiny filament--stretching from heaven to my little room on 190th Street in New York. I fell asleep holding on to it with all my strength."
   
   Oh, what a joy to learn that God is for us and not against us! I highly recommend this book.



2. Tramp for the Lord is ONE of the most rewarding books I have ever read in my life. Everyone should read this book. She too was a human who sinned and came short of the glory of God. Corrie shares so much of her heart and life - not only because of her experiences in prison, but in every day life as she traveled the United States and to other countries to share God's work. As she experienced real life situations with ordinary people, that grew her daily in her walk with God, because as Paul learned, God's work was not easy. It was those situations that she shared in "Tramp for the Lord" that she was also growing with each situation she faced as Paul did as he continued in his day discipling for God. Corrie's book, "Tramp for the Lord," is a must read after "the Hiding Place" and will be hard to put down.



3. This book is a sequel to "The Hiding Place" a biography about Corrie Ten Boom's experience during World War II, arrested and sent to a German concentration camp for hiding Jews.
   
   Corrie surrenders to God's Will for her life to take the Gospel and her story to the entire world. Because of her humbleness, she is able to connect to people from all walks of life, from royalty to prisoners. She was especially able to connect with prisoners who were hopeless because of her own experience of being locked up.
   
   It was easy for her to minister to the victims of WWII, but Corrie resisted going back to Germany, the land that she dreaded. But she obeys and goes to Germany where she meets one of her former prison guards, one of the cruelest, walking up to her after a meeting. A chill grips her heart and bitterness wells up when he asks for her forgiveness. Leaning on the power of the Holy Spirit, she was able to forgive her enemy and found God's love overflowing.
   
   Each chapter is a story and devotional about a situation Corrie encounters. My favorite one is, "I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go, Dear Lord... but Not Up Ten Flights of Stairs."



4. If you read this book you will NEVER forget it. Such wonderful testimony to the miracles that the Lord is still doing in the world. I highly recommend it. It's a real page turner.



5. Tramp for the lord is an eye opener for you to look at where you are, where you have been and where you are going. A good read for those moving through life and a must read for those that want to celebrate life to it's fullest.

5 comments about In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust.

1. As the child of parents who came from the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary, and as one raised within that Orthodoxy, albeit transplanted to America, this book exposed me to a portion of Hungarian Jewish history I never really knew. This book speaks of the tragedy of so many Hungarian Jews. Jews who were totally estranged from their ancestral faith, who had no attachment to their heritage. For those people, Judaism was an undesirabe yoke to be cast aside or at best ignored. This book tells the reader however that one cannot truly escape his true identity. The true hero of the book, the author's father, discovers this in the hell of Bergen-Belsen. His uncle, the priest, spends the war in relative safety, but always in fear that he would be denounced. That uncle also has to contend with the very real possiblity that his Hungarian coreligionists "allowed" him to escape to Italy into the warm embrace of Padre Pio and the Capuchin monks not out of dedication to him in the spirit of Christian fellowship, but rather out of a desire to be rid of another Jew.
   The emotions that pervade this book are powerful. The characters are real. The dialogue, while made up, displays the pathos of the characters and speaks to the reader's soul.
   This book is about many things: religion, families and their dysfunctions, theodicy, Catholic-Jewish relations, and overding all of those, this book is about the complexity of life. Like all great works, the message of this book will be shaped by the reader and his/her weltanschaung.



2. I thought this was a good book and could not put it down. It explores the issues of assimilation among Budapest's Jews, conversion issues, Jewish and Catholic relations, Jesiwh security or lack thereof, Catholic complicity in the Holocaust and the Catholic church setting the stage for millenia that made the Holocaust possible. It also talks of family love and connectedness despite serious philosophical differences. We're discussing this in my book club and it should be very interesting.



3. I remember reading about this real-life story a number of years before this book was actually published; I still have the clipped article from the Boston Globe in one of my scrapbooks. Then, when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mr. Pogany came to our Hillel one Friday night and after services and dinner read from his book and spoke to us about the story behind it. Having met the author makes reading a book even better!
   
   I've very interested in what befell Hungarian Jewry during WWII, possibly because it's so painful and haunting to realise that they were the last nation to be invaded by the Nazis, the final Jewish community in Europe still pretty much fully intact, but for the men who had been drafted into labour battalions or sent off to work camps several years earlier. It's an even more interesting and unique story because the family became Catholics shortly after WWI ended, and they were very devout, so much so that the author's uncle Gyuri eventually became a priest, and his father, Miklós, had seriously contemplated becoming one too. Because of a painful health condition, Gyuri got permission to recover his health in Italy, which was a stroke of luck, since he got out before things really began getting worse and worse, even before the arrival of the Nazis. Though the twins' mother was deported and murdered, the rest of the family did not live in the small town she did, and because they were in Budapest did not suffer the fate of the other Hungarian Jews in smaller towns and cities, who were packed into ghettos and then deported. The Budapest Ghetto wasn't erected until very late in the War, and when Miklós and his wife Muci (also a distant cousin of his) were finally deported, they were "only" taken to Bergen-Belsen as opposed to one of the death camps in Poland like the majority of their Hungarian co-religionists had been.
   
   Because he was tucked away safely in Italy, a place which only lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, in the care of the holy mystic Padre Pio, Gyuri was not subject to anything like his twin brother and the rest of their family were. He could never understand why his beloved twin had lost faith in Catholicism and Christianity, how he could go back to Judaism, the religion they'd left as small boys and had never even really been very much of a part of in their early years before they all converted. Many people both then and now have made apologies for the collaboration, either active or through silent complicity, of ordinary citizens in allowing the Shoah to take place, much like Gyuri did, but Miklós and Muci had seen firsthand what had happened to them. Despite nearly thirty years of being a good Catholic, he was not protected from even the "good" labour brigade for converts. In the eyes of the Nazis and ordinary Hungarians, his family were still Jewish. The local parish priest arranged for their mother Gabriella to be taken from the ghetto to his church every day to hear Mass before she was deported, but he still didn't try to hide her or protect her from deportation. This book explores the complex relationship between not only the brothers who were separated by faith but also how the Church failed to protect its members, all members, and to speak out against what was going on, and how something of such a large scale could never have happened without the kind of hatred and collaboration from the common folk that the Poganies saw breaking through the surface after the Nazis and Hungarian fascists came to power.



4. The book, In My Brother's Image, was a book that caught my attention and made me want to keep reading. This book showed this very well. You learn about Gyuri and Miklos', identical twin brothers, life before the war when they were best friends, during the war how religion had torn them apart and the events leading to it, and after how different they had become. Miklos' son Eugene wrote the book, not Gyuri or Miklos. He vicariously wrote it and he makes it seem as though he were right there. The accounts in this book are based upon his father, uncle, aunt, and printed documents from the time such as newspapers and books.
   I, personally, am very into the Holocaust and what happened to families before, during, and after the war so if you are too I definitely think you should consider this book. If you like to see how people can change on a general level this is a good book. If you are like me, liking to learn about the Holocaust or history for that matter, this is an excellent book. Those on grade level 10, 11, and 12 (and on) will be able to understand book because of the language and words used. So once again read this book.



5. This Book is for everybody to read, it is very interesting and powerful