No comments about Great Jewish Thinkers: Their Lives and Work.

2 comments about Hannah Szenes: A Song of Light.

1. Hannah Senesh is the symbol of virtue, valor, and compassion. She risked, and lost, everything she ever had to save others. This book deserves an accolade of praise, and should be recommended to young adult readers. Not only does it give the reader an understanding of this dark time in history, it also presents a sense of hope. For even in the darkest of shadows, there is a light- like Hannnah Sensesh. Highly recommended!



2. Hannah Senesh is the symbol of virtue, valor, and compassion. She risked, and lost, everything she ever had to save others. This book deserves an accolade of praise, and should be recommended to young adult readers. Not only does it give the reader an understanding of this dark time in history, it also presents a sense of hope. For even in the darkest of shadows, there is a light like the Hannnah Sensesh. Highly recommended!

1 comments about Albert Kahn: Builder of Detroit (Detroit Biography Series for Young Readers).

1. I bought this as a present for my nephew, along with a field trip of downtown Detroit, where we spend an afternoon spotting Albert Kahn buildings. He loved it and continues to reread this book! It has the right amount of history, a good story and explains basic architectural terms.

No comments about Thinking God: The Mysticism of Rabbi Zadok of Lublin.

2 comments about Anus Mundi: 1,500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau.

1. If you only read one book about the holocaust, this should be it. Mr. Kielars memoir is the difinitive book on Auschwitz/Birkenau. This book is moveing, horrific and full of feeling. It goes beyond the documentation of events to the dreams, fears, and struggles of a human being in the face of one of the worst events in history. Anus Mundi gives a personal view of the people and events that shaped the concentration camp from those that helped ease suffering, to those who created it. Mr. Kielar shares not only the persecution of the Jews, but also the Gypsies, political prisoners, homosexuals, and more. This book is a beautifully detailed, extremely personal look at life and death in Auschwitz.



2. Anus Mundi--1500 Days in Auschwitz/Birkenau is a detailed and shattering view of life in the death camps of the Holocaust. Unlike the writing of Elie Wiesel, Jean Amery, and to a lesser extent, Primo Levi, which is deeply and movingly introspective, Wieslaw Kielar details the brutalities of life in the camps with a simple objectivity that is unsparing in its directness. In this narrative, we learn nothing about Kielar prior to June 1940 and nothing about him after his liberation of the camps four years later. We do know he is Polish Catholic who occasionally prays, but other than that the book is devoid of religious, philosophical or political overtones.

   The dozens of camp vignettes that the author has accumulated in this book are as sharp as the eye of a camera: brilliant, detailed, focused and memorable. The closest comparison in style would be Borowski, Kielar's tragic countryman. In each case, the strict lack of sentiment and intellectual elaboration serve only to heighten the horror and leave us with no doubt as to the authenticity of the recollections and their attendant suffering.

   Although Kielar's misery was unrelieved, for all its deprivations, his fate was slightly easier that that of the Jewish prisoners. This is in no way meant to be disparaging. Kielar suffered more than his share of harsh blows, severe winters, starvation and infestation with lice and fleas. Although not a Jew, for Kielar, too, the brutalities of the sadistic Kapos were never far away. His memoir records a long season in hell that would have destroyed a lesser man.

   Amidst this suffering and degradation, however, Kielar reveals that contacts with the civilian world outside of the camp were still possible for him, that he was entitled to receive packages from home, that correspondence with his family took place with a certain amount of regularity and most of all, that he did not live each day in fear of the ovens and gas chambers which were reserved for the arriving Jews. Those Jews whose lives were spared suffered a fate that proved, ultimately, to be harsher than that suffered by Kielar and the other Polish political prisoners.

   This is an intimate and extremely well-written book about the horrors of the Holocaust and it contains a wealth of information. One must though, when reading, remember that there were qualitatively different orders of experience among the various inmates of the camps. Kielar could, at least, count on the fact that he had a chance of outlasting and overcoming the wretchedness. The Jews, however, were from the moment of their arrival, marked for certain death. If not immediately dispatched to the gas chamber, they were worked until death mercifully overtook them.

   The acknowledgment of this distinction among the prisoners in no way detracts from the vividness or the pathos of Kielar's memoir of his 1500 days in hell. We must read and remember each survivor's story for its own unique reasons. In Kielar's case, the reasons are compelling enough to make this a first-class memoir in the annals of Holocaust literature.

1 comments about The Dictionary of Jewish Biography.

1. The idea of this work is to give capsule biographies of a large number of Jews from all different areas of human endeavor. This is in itself admirable, but the length of the entries, usually a few brief lines, makes them into telegraphic bits of information, without any element of story.
   Thus 'The Dictionary of Jewish Biography' ed. by Geoffrey Wigoder is if far from perfect, nonetheless still more useful than this present volume.

5 comments about In Kindling Flame: The Story of Hannah Senesh, 1921-1944.

1. This biography for young adults uses the diary, letters, poetry, interviews with her mother and brother, and official documents to tell the story of Hannah Senesh. Atkinson begins Hannah's story by describing her happy life before anti-Semitism took hold in Hungary. She uses Hannah's own words to describe her need to make something of her life. Hannah's decision to immigrate to Palestine shows that she clearly appreciated the potential for danger in remaining in Hungary too long. The reader quickly comes to admire Hannah, for she is described as a flesh-and-blood creature. She is forceful, determined, and youthful, but not without self-doubt. It is her self-doubt that makes her want to "do something" by returning to Hungary from the relative security of Palestine to help Jews escape to freedom. Although Hannah's mission was not successful, her willingness to act decisively makes her a symbol of her adopted homeland. By reading the story of Hannah Senesh, young readers will gain a clearer understanding into the national character of Israel.



2. I read this book in the 6th grade and it was very heavy, but it is my favorite book. I did a project on Hanna Senesh and I learned so much about the Holocaust. I would recomend this book to anyone who needs to be inspired. Hanna Senesh was a brave young lady.



3. When I first read this book, I had just finished touring the Holocaust Museum in Wash. D.C and I picked this out at the bookstore. I am amazed by this book. The reader immediatly falls in love with Hannah, for her strength and courage. The reader finds themselves reading on wanting to know if she succeeds the Nazis or not. If you enjoy reading about the Holocaust, you will love this book! Thank You for reading my review.



4. When I read this book, I had no idea what to expect. The assidnment was to read a book from the WWII/Holocaust period. There were shelves full, but this one caught my attention. I took it home and started to read, but was so sucked in I didn't want to stop! Hannah Senesh had such a wonderful story, and I could easily compare her to Anne Frank. She had such a wonderful personality; she was poetic, determined, and courageous. Unlike Anne, Hannah didn't go into hiding. She escaped to Palestine and trained for a parachuting mission back to her homeland of Hungary. She was captured and beaten, and eventually killed, but remained a beacon to her fellow women in jail, making dolls for children and teaching Hebrew to the adults. Hannah was such an inspiration, I think everyone should read her story.



5. I just received this today and skimmed over the pages. There is close to nothing about why the British flew these Jews from Palestine into Europe. There is a vauge reference to intelligence work, but even the young girls' book on Hannah Senesh put out by Scholastic Books states on the back cover that she was sent by the British to set up an escape network for Allied airmen shot down in the region. The group was also sent to help repatriate Russian soldiers from the nearby (to Roumania) Soviet border. The VHS movie "Hannah's War" from the 1980s makes that also very clear and plain.
   
   I felt I was reading a good general history of WW II, with Jewish partisan movement included and major battles, but not a book about why Hannah Senesh voluteered to go to Europe on a dangerous mission, other than to see her mother. As if this was "tourist season" in WW II.
   
   The need for Hannah's mission (it included 30 men and another woman) stems originally from the Allies repeated air attacks on the Ploesti oilfields in Roumania which supplied the Germans 60% of their oil. The first attack in 1943 lead to 200 shot down Allied fliers captured. This lead to two other major attacks on the oilfields because the were put back in production quickly. Flack damaged airplanes can go hundreds of miles before a need for the crew to parachute out. The border distances between Roumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (the return route to an Allied airbase in Italy) are small, even for a World War II bomber. In fact, Hannah's group did rescue some Allied airmen. And there was a major secondary reason the British knew about but would not endorse: setting up escape networks for fleeing Jewish refugees AFTER WW II to get to Palestine (Israel) by outfoxing the British blockade, a blockade in effect even before WW II.
   
   But reading this book, I got the impression that the author Linda Atkinson all but thought the British were running a travel agency or a "Make a Wish" Foundation to reunite Hannah with her mother. Despite the worthy inclusion of many biographical concerns of a Hannah as a young woman, including boyfriends, decisions about what she wanted to do with her life, her self-doubts and strengths, I found the extremely limited discussion of why Hannah was sent to Europe an insult to the military mission, the British and the Israelis who risked their lives to fly all 32 native European speakers in to set up escape networks. I thought, in the sections regarding Hannah, that I was reading "Hannah's (Not So) Excellent Adventure." I would recommend the Scholastic book over this for teenage girls.

1 comments about Botchki: When Doomsday Was Still Tomorrow.

1. David Zagier wrote this book over a period of sixty years. It was first drafted in the thirties and finished only sixty years later. It tells of his childhood shtetl which was destroyed by the Nazis. He tells of his childhood there , the world of his parents. He attempts to reconstruct a world lost.
   This is a clearly written memoir and it tells its story in a good way. There were unfortunately hundreds of other such shtetls who had no one to tell their story, and keep alive if only on the page, those characters and personalities who made their world so colorful.
   This is a valuable highly readable memoir.

1 comments about Jerusalem Mosaic: Young Voices from the Holy City.

1. I found "Jerusalem Mosaic" to be facinating reading. The diversity of the population of this intriguing city was mirrored by teens from many backgrounds who are interviewed in this book. Many views were passionately experssed by the young adults portrayed. It was interesting to learn of cultures vastly different from what is familiar to me. I found the openness and honesty of these teens refreshing. I could feel the passion that burns in many of them. The authors present the youths' differences in up-bringing, cultural background, religion (or lack of it), and political views without distorting the words that these young adults used. (The recommended age is 9-12 years, however I feel that this very important book is also appropriate for adults of all ages.)

1 comments about The Holocaust Lady.

1. This story illustrates a remarkable story of the hurt and pain that a woman and so many others have suffered emotionally, and physically- how much we really can and do take our lives for granted. An emotional story will touch your heart and soul and show you how much you should really appreciate all that you have-even if it isn't much at all...