5 comments about The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition.

1. This is not an "easy read" if that's what you're looking for. Plan to spend some time trying to get into this book. Way too technical for what I was looking for.



2. I regard this book as an important addition to my collection of books written by and about Anne Frank. It is for study, rather than for casual reading. The front section of the book contains lots of information about the diary and how it was determined to be authentic. The back section compares three different versions/translations of the diary, page by page. The book contains all of the writings of Anne Frank in one volume.



3. I loved the original Anne Frank I read well in High School. I thought this one would be really good now that I'm older. It was extremely hard to follow so I have had to put it down. I will try again later. It does have some very good parts in it and some pictures you haven't seen.



4. After reading many versions of the Diary of Anne Frank, it was great to finally see the original version Anne herself wrote, with no edits. The first part of this book details the verification process when the authenticity of Anne's diary was challenged. The second part takes Anne's original diary, her own edited version that she began just before discovery, and the published version that Otto edited and compares them in small sections together. Its very well documented and if this is an area of interest to you, I highly recommend it.



5. (...)
   
   Anne Frank is an excellent writer and all the idolatry that surrounds her today can often make us forget that. This book is pretty much the definitive presentation of her writings, including not only her diary, but her short stories as well. This is the one to get.

5 comments about Four Girls From Berlin: A True Story of a Friendship That Defied the Holocaust.

1. Marianne Meyerhoff had a good story to tell but unfortunately she failed to give it it's due; it has so much unfilled potential. It is poorly written and what was sorely lacking was any real investigation and research into her story; so much was needed to be said. I had the feeling that she was encouraged to write the story and did so too quickly to be effective. I question her facts, and translations from German to English. Had she interviewed her principals more throroughly the results would have been better. The book is short, only 241 pages and I had the feeling that at times she was putting in irrelevent material just to pad the pages. Marianne did not ask the pertinent questions that a good writer/investigator would have and it wasn't until the very end that her husband supplied her with questions to ask that she should have thought on her own. There was much left hanging. The story could have had so much more to it and left so much unsaid. One wonders what her mother's friends did during the war; why was more attention not given to how her mother's things were hidden; why did Erica refuse to talk about Ursula at the end and why was more space not given to her mother's rescue and hiding after the illfated trip of the St. Louis. It was very disappointing and at the end I felt that too much had not been said. The one redeeming feature was the many photographs of the family and friends.



2. Rich in heartfelt emotion and profound wisdom, this exceptionally well-written piece is a multi-faceted literary gem. Brilliant first-time author Marianne Meyerhoff empathetically chronicles her mother Lotte's fragile reawakening to life years after a harrowing solo escape from the Nazis to America left her in torment and shock as the only survivor of her extended Jewish family.
   
   One fateful day a huge, mysterious container arrives at their door in Hollywood, California, like a special delivery from God. It contains family heirlooms, treasured photos, letters, and documents. Lotte's closest German girlfriends, none a Jew, courageously and repeatedly risked their lives to smuggle them out of her family's home in Berlin and restore them to her after the war.
   
   From Ms. Meyerhoff's diligent quest for personal identity and family history emerges an unforgettable saga. It honors the enduring, inter-generational friendships between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans who courageously defied, sometimes openly, the Nazi tyranny and persecution destroying their country and robbing them of their loved ones.
   
   As engaging as her narrative is, the philosophical examination of key issues inherent within her characters' tragic circumstances equally compels our reflection. She gives voice to the view that forgiveness is most of all for the sake of the one forgiving, who needs to be released from remaining a victim.
   
   For Marianna's grandfather, the Old Professor, to flee the Nazi regime would be to commit a dishonorable act of betrayal to his beloved German homeland. How could he turn his back on his country when it needed him most to speak out against the injustice?
   
   Rabbi Benny reminds us that spiritual healing requires giving up hating those who would destroy you because to return their hate is to destroy yourself; and that without the power to choose between good and evil, there is no freedom, and no possibility for spiritual transformation.
   
   Finally, the question of redemption. Is there a way to "make good again" the Holocaust?
   She offers two important suggestions. The first is to "own up to it" and incorporate it into the German educational system's curriculum, so that subsequent generations can benefit from "the healing power of remorse" and learn right from wrong.
   
   The second suggests there is no "antidote". "All one can do is hope to artfully and productively accommodate the heartache in the beauty of the present unfolding of life."
   This book fulfills that mission.



3. This is a fascinating story. But it is seriously marred by sloppy editing, particularly in the rendering of almost all the many German words and phrases. While reading the book, I had the feeling I was looking at an early, uncorrected draft, one that never received the attention of an even minimally competent German language consultant. This is unacceptable in an expensive hardcover book. And it greatly diminished the author's fine work.



4. This is a poignantly written tale of one woman's gradual dawning awareness of the tragedy that befell her family; it's a tale of the holocaust, crafted by one too young to have understood its immensity at the time, but who had to try in the aftermath to understand why she and her mother stood alone with no near relatives.
   
   It's also a tale of outreach and forgiveness towards those she might have condemned. The result gives us a new understanding of those tragic events and of the nation that brought it about. The author's tale is as much one of hope and salvation as it is a tale of tragecy.
   
   I recommend it unqualifiedly.



5. Marianne Meyerhoff has written an affectingly-personal account that serves a greater purpose: to remind us, yet again, of the strength to love in the face of manifold evil. It is the story of a woman of indomitable spirit, Lotte, who, with the help of an extended family that includes the three other 'girls' of the book's title, salvages a collection of heirlooms--the severed bonds of a family history torn apart by Nazi Germany. Lotte finds a new home for herself and her child, the author, in the United States; the salvaged artifacts serve as a poignant testimony of loss and, above all, love. This is a book you will not soon forget.

5 comments about Passport to Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust.

1. Passport to Life is a must read. It is clearly written and engaging. Dr. Tanay's story of survival is moving and reminds us all of how the genocide of the Nazi's must never be forgotten. Like the story of Passover, it must be retold over and over to remind new generations of the risk. This is especially true post 9-11. His last few chapters begin to look at the modern problem of Islamic fundamentalists and hopefully foreshadow another great book.



2. When you pick up this book you will not be able to put it down. The "story" is a moment-to-moment recounting of daily survival. The situations that this young boy finds himself in are beyond the imagination of most people who have grown up in a country like America. The resourcefulness and intelligence necessary for a young teenager to survive each day, not knowing what will become of him the next, are not only an amazing and fascinating story, but a LIFE of a child. Not only did Dr. Tanay survive, he also saved his mother, sister and close childhood friend. His father suffered at the hands of Amos Goeth, infamously renowned for his role in the Plascow camp depicted in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List". Dr. Tanay's insight into his own plight, the plight of European Jewry as well as the psyche of hatred in religion and ideological movements is intelligent, moving and educational. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the human spirit and the analysis of societal and religious movements that can lead to assertions, beliefs and actions that are generated by arrogance of opinion.



3. Bring your thinking cap and your Kleenex box as this autobiographic analysis of the Holocaust years will grab both your intellect and your emotional senses. The writing style generates empathy and is sophisticated, yet easy reading. Amazing is Dr. Tanay's ability to add palatible, forensic psychological analysis to the terrifying events of his youth. His emphasis on thoroughness and accuracy is startling. His accomplishments as an adult, he recognizes, are dwarfed by his accomplishments in just four years during his teens. This very detailed and personal story of luck, skill, ingenuity, deception, devotion and love makes unique and fascinating reading. This should make a great film- I hope Spielberg is reading. This is a required read for Holocaust scholars and a desired read for those who "enjoy" a story of a boy's ability and will to be a survivor.



4. "PASSPORT to LIFE' by Dr. Emanuel Tanay brilliantly describes the heroic survival of an adolescent to save himself, his younger sister and his mother, through unbelievable circumstances, during the German occupation of Poland and Hungary in WWII.
   This autobiographical story describes a different type of holocaust survival, than those in the Nazi concentration camps.
   Mark Fintel (A holocaust survivor)



5. Passport To Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust is the firsthand story of Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a successful forensic psychiatrist and a Jew who survived the depredations of Nazi genocide during World War II, when he was only a child. After the war, his experienced hatred and the threat of murder in his native Poland, but relative peace and asylum in Germany, and later moved to America. Sixty years later, his testimony is not only a narration of and reflection upon the genocidal atrocities he personally witnessed and experienced. It reveals the struggles of survivors to cling to life to be heroic and resourceful, in a situation where lack of power and arms among Jews in general meant that direct resistance against the Nazis would only guarantee personal extermination. Passport To Life is also an erudite and scholarly treatise on the nature of hatred, and the core human impulses that are all too easily channeled into sadistic and masochistic fervor ("you have to be carefully taught not to hate", the author warns), whether by organized religion, ideology, totalitarian government, or other sources. Passport To Life is particularly vital in that it deconstructs mythologies that have arisen about the Holocaust. For example, the author was personally present in Warsaw at the time the Uprising began, and warns against characterizing it as a true rebellion, since it claimed the lives of very few German soldiers and had zero military impact upon the course of the war. Rather, he characterizes it as a mass suicide of Jews who preferred to die from German guns rather than be sent to Treblinka. Since World War II there has been a tendency to overdramatize or exaggerate Christian rescues of Jewish people; Tanay respects the nobility of those who did so but also carefully delineates examples in which the truth is lost to the need to mythologize history and a few make good men into saints rather than confront the overall horror of what really happened. Tanay further dissects with clinical expertise the nature of hared itself, demonstrating that the most virulent hatreds are perpetrated against individuals or groups the hater knows nothing about, or believes fantasies about; hatred is not borne of logic or reason, and therefore rationality is no defense against it. Emphasizing the critical importance of broadcasting a counter-message to the many widespread propaganda of hate today, including but not limited to hatred against unbelievers spread within specific Islamic states, Passport To Life offers the key to understanding and hopefully preventing worse geneocidal deprevations in the future. Though it deals with complex psychological issues, Passport To Life is written in plain terms that invite no confusion regardless of the readers' level of familiarity with history or psychology. Passport To Life is far, far more than an autobiographical memoir. It is more than a record of Holocaust atrocities. It is quite literally the embodiment of its title, an indispensible contribution to Holocaust literature shelves and psychology shelves, and bears the absolute highest recommendation to school libraries, public libraries, Holocaust literature collections, scholars and lay readers alike. Do not pass up this book.

3 comments about Shanghai Legacy.

1. Author Cuba takes a little-known chapter in Jewish history and writes a very worthy novel. The device is a diary; Maya finds the diary of her mysterious mother Hannah after Hannah dies. Now some of the mystery of Hannah's life unfolds for Maya, and she learns of her mother's struggles, bravery and difficulties while she examines her own life through new eyes. Hannah escaped Germany and went to Shanghai and ultimately ended up in America. The story of her flight and her struggles is the backdrop for the novel, and as the mystery of Hannah unfolds, Maya learns a lot about her own life and her own attitudes.
   
   The diary is the most fascinating part of the book--the refugees in China mourn the loss of their comfortable life in German and they live in squalor in Japanese-occupied China. Shanghai is dirty and cold. Diseases are rampant, yet the Jewish refugees hear stories of Treblinka and realize that though life is hard, it is far more horrible in Germany. And the survivor guilt sets in, for the victims of the Holocaust, for those left behind when Hannah goes to America.
   
   This is a very good novel; the interleaving of Maya's life is typical of novels today that twine two lives together and show their relationship and contrasts. But for me, the diary was so poignant and real, it almost overshadowed Maya's story. However, alone it is almost too much to read and together with Maya's tale, you can almost walk her part and with her, begin to untangle the lives that affected you from the past, lives with struggles that we can hardly know.
   
   A terrific book. Recommended.



2. Cuba does a sensitive job depicting the complicated life of Hannah, a German Jewish teenager in World War II era Shanghai. This gripping page turner is as exciting in its flash-forward story of her adult daughter years later in Manhattan as it is of the highly perilous years of Hannah's youth in China. I only regret that I cannot read it again for the first time.



3. "Your mother," she repeats, dipping her nurse's cap toward Hannah's room again, "she is like a melon that will never ripen, Miss Silver," is what the nurse tells the dying woman's daughter, Maya.
   
   That unripened melon, Maya soon discovers is her mother's diary dating back to 1938, when approximately twenty thousand European Jews escaped Nazi Germany to Shanghai and created a unique ghetto. Why Shanghai? It was the only city in the world that accepted foreigners without any entry requirements.
   
   Marion Cuba's debut novel, Shanghai Legacy, draws her central character, Maya, into the private thoughts and secrets of her mother Hanna, whom she never fully knew, and whose childhood had been lost amidst the life-changing hardships she had endured while a refugee in Shanghai.
   
   Maya is hungry to explore an era that was never spoken about in their household and of which she was ignorant. Moreover, Maya realizes, objects such as diaries, hold meaning, as they reveal an individual's aspirations and dreams, as well as their eventual relationships with family members.
   
   All of this becomes vividly possible by the discovery of Hannah's German diary recounting her teen-age experiences in Shanghai. The diary is translated to Maya by an antique dealer Sam Ascher, whom she hires to appraise her later mother's furniture. Sam is a former attorney, who has taken over his father's business, and as Maya subsequently learns, is a child of Holocaust survivors.
   
   Interwoven into the narrative is Maya's discovery of herself and her cold and difficult relationship with her husband, Harold, who is a prominent ophthalmologist, and very much wrapped up in himself and his profession. Maya challenges Harold's repressive hold over her when she decides to keep her mother's home that she has inherited. This leads to her frequent stays in the house, while it is being renovated. However, it also causes some guilt feelings, as she questions herself playing house alone and not even thinking of Harold, as well as her life in Chappaqua.
   
   There is a good story here; unfortunately, it is jumbled up in the roots of a much longer tale that needs to be told. How much richer would it have been if there was more detailed exploration of just how much Hanna's life affected that of her daughter's. Nonetheless, the author shows a great deal of promise and the novel certainly deserves a read.
   
   
   Norm Goldman, Editor Bookpleasures
   
   
   
   
   
   

3 comments about Shivitti: A Vision (Gateways Consciousness Classics) (Consciousness Classics).

1. Yehiel Dinur, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 survived the horrors of the Holocaust only to discover that survival alone would not end his torment. Hunted by distressing symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) he underwents a supervised LSD treatment program. Unfortunately after many sessions his situation deteriorates and he decides to leave the program. He writes near the end of the book: "I can't stop thinking that maybe I shouldn't have provoked fate by trying to rewrite my life script. Maybe I should never have made that trip to En-Dor, should never have used LSD to conjure up the secret that a Hand, keeping its own counsel, had cared enough to hide from me."
   
   Short, honest and heart-wrenching book highly recommended to all transpersonal psychotherapists, underground psychedelic therapists, Holotropic Breathwork practitioners and everyone else interested in the depths of human psyche.



2. This book is a great insight into the personality of the author Yehiel Dinur a.k.a Katzetik. The book stands on its own as a powerful recording of the events that took place in the life of the author during the holocaust. As with all of Katzetnik's books the events are heart wrentching. Particulary worth recalling in this book is when he for the first time goes to a beach in Europe during his medical treatment of the 1970s and exposes his arm that was tatooed in Aushwitz with his inmate number 135633. The scene is chilling and unforgetable. The premise of the use of LSD to come to terms with his lifelong nighmares about his experiences of the holocaust is secondary except for the fact that it is through this means that the author comes to terms with his pain caused by the cruel germans and their helpers. Overall, this book is an important read and is even more stunning if you read Katzetnik's other books. Katzetmik is one of the most powerful and important authors on the subject of the holocaust and his books are a must read for everyone lest the world forget what happened.



3. This book is not for the faint hearted or for the person whio is interested in history. The premise of the book is that the author relives his Aschiwitz experence through LSD treatment by a psychogist. Some things he remembers are likley to have happened to him, and some are a nightmare of things he cannot escape. If you want to read any of this authors books you need to have a strong stomach, It is a very rewarding and powerfull book if you are up for it

3 comments about Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna.

1. Australian philosopher Peter Singer, now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has written a thoughtful, well-researched portrait of his grandfather, David Oppenheim, who perished in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. "We all know that six million Jews died," writes Singer in the Prologue, "but that is a mind-numbing statistic. I have a chance to portray one of them as an individual."

   His grandfather was a classical scholar in Vienna, a teacher of Greek and Latin at a prestigious gymnasium (high school), and an active participant in the city's psychoanalytic circles as a collaborator, then critic of Sigmund Freud, and a friend and supporter of Alfred Adler, the first of Freud's colleagues to defect from his inner circle over basic disagreements about psychoanalytic theory.
   
   Oppenheim's wife, Amalie (a math and physics scholar in her own right) was also sent to Theresienstadt, but she survived, the only one of Singer's four grandparents to do so. She moved to Australia in 1946, the year Singer was born, and lived with his family for nine years until her death in 1955. Singer went on to study philosophy at Oxford and teach at Monash University in Australia, but always in the background there was a cloud of sadness and silence that hung over his family's recent past. (On his mother's side he comes from a long line of rabbis stretching back to the seventeenth century.)

   His aunt's master's thesis about her father inspired Singer to learn more about his grandfather and write this book. He collected his grandfather's personal papers, letters between his grandparents before their marriage that he retrieved from his aunt's attic, and letters his grandparents wrote to his parents and aunt after they emigrated to Australia in 1938. Singer also travelled to Vienna to see where his grandparents lived and visit the school where his grandfather taught. He searched for additional pertinent information in the Austrian archives, interviewed his grandfather's surviving students, and went to Theresienstadt to see for himself where his grandfather died. Singer believed that reading through his grandfather's vast collection of writings in German, most of them in longhand that was difficult to read, would be "to undo, in some infinitely small but still quite palpable way, a wrong done by the Holocaust."

   The final part of the book describes the departure of the children to Australia in 1938 after the Anschluss, the illusory hope that life would somehow go on, the desperate efforts from faraway Melbourne to save the parents from the impeding catastrophe, and finally Theresienstadt. During his research Singer also learned what happened to his paternal grandparents: the Germans transported them to Lodz in Poland (after that they were probably gassed at Chelmno).

   Professor Singer's well-crafted tribute to his grandfather and the lost world of Jewish Vienna is a valuable contribution to Holocaust remembrance and mourning.

   --Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust




2. An excellent and important story that needs to be told over and over again. But for those of us who use non-fiction books such as this for research as well, this book lacks a crucial element--an index. I could not recommend this book to someone researching information on the Holocaust because there is no way for someone to retrieve important information without laboriously searching page by page through the book. When will publishers learn what researchers and librarians know, a non-fiction book without an index is not complete?



3. This is a compelling and frequently moving account of the author's grandparents' lives from the turn of the century in Vienna to the middle years of the twentieth century. The grandparents, David and Amalie Oppenheim, had both the good and bad fortune to live through some of the most interesting and tragic times of the last century. As young, educated, middle-class Jews living in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, they experienced the last days of the Hapsburg empire, the intellectual currents of the time and place (including being part of Freud's circle), the first world war, the depression, anti-semitism, Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as the great intellectual achievements of Austro-German culture.

   The book is a fascinating account of the period, as well as the curious relationship between David and Amalie, whose homosexual feelings towards others seem to lead them into marriage and children of their own. The final chapters, describing post-Anschluss Vienna, the ghetto conditions in which they were forced to live, and finally Theresienstadt concentration camp are harrowing and moving. As a memoir rather than a history, the book is written well and reads easily; though there are references to other works, it is not in any way dull or academic. The author's frequent comparisons between his grandfather's way of thinking and his own are I feel a little forced, but this is only a minor quibble, especially when the humanity of both the author and the grandparents about whom he is writing is evident. Highly recommended.

   One book which Singer refers to frequently is Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", which I would also highly recommend to anyone interested in the period or subject matter.

5 comments about In My Father's House: The Years Before "the Hiding Place" (Corrie Ten Boom Library).

1. This quite-amazing book chronicles the half century of Corrie ten Boom's life before being imprisoned for helping to save Jewish people in Holland during World War II. I can't express just how profoundly this book enlightened me to the Christian way people could actually live. I haven't been around many outstanding Christians and the ten Boom family was definitely a Christian family. How blessed I am to know about them!



2. IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE makes an excellent companion to THE HIDING PLACE and TRAMP FOR THE LORD. After discovering all the stories of Corrie ten Boom from the time she went into a German concentration camp during World War II until her death, her early years had always remained a mystery. And now, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE tells exactly what happened to Corrie during her first 50 years of life.
   
   Starting out with Corrie's great-grandfather, the book tells the story of how the early events in Corrie's life shaped her and prepared her for prison. Some of these stories will make you smile (Corrie was apparently a little rascal at times), and some will make you want to cry. Corrie's life was an amazing tapestry of love for people and her Savior. From Corrie ten Boom's girl clubs to the great halls of St. Bavo's Cathedral, you'll fall in love with Corrie ten Boom all over again with IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE.
   
   The end of the book brings everything full circle up to the point of THE HIDING PLACE, and then is followed by the Golden Tea Party (you'll have to read to find out about that!). All in all, IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE is another great read from the life of Corrie, but I do recommend reading THE HIDING PLACE first. That book makes this one a little easier to understand.
   
   Check it out!



3. She writes with the love and forgiveness that became her trademark after suffering terrible things at the hands of the Nazi's during WWII. I never cease to be encouraged, uplifted, and inspired when reading anything that she writes-this book included. Very few could have forgiven their tormentors the way that Tante Corrie did. She did it by the grace of God and her life was all the better for it.



4. As someone who voraciously gobbles up the writings of Corrie ten Boom, I have to say that _In My Father's House_ is my favorite. Anyone who has read _The Hiding Place_ , _Tramp for the Lord_, _A Prison and Yet_, or other books relating to Corrie's Nazi concentration camp imprisonment and her resulting ministry should do themselves a favor and savor _In My Father's House_. I am so glad this book is back in print and can now reach a new audience. Corrie discusses how the twists and turns of her childhood, teen years, and pre-imprisonment adulthood all came together to prepare her for her WWII and postwar ministry. She shows the evidence of God moving in her life to prepare her for her upcoming adventures. If you don't think so already, _In My Father's House_ may be what convinces you that there's no such thing as coincidence. The simply written, very basic family story of this book holds some deep implications. It may startle you in a pleasant way.

   I particularly recommend this book to parents, especially parents of young children. This book will show how God uses you to raise your child to fulfill God's purpose for his/her life. Corrie writes in a very touching way of how her parents, siblings, and extended family were so responsible for the extraordinary woman she became. This book is a beautiful testimony of how God uses families. It will inspire you to go pick up and cuddle your child while praying fervently. It will also remind you of your need to lean on God and rely on his guidance for this your most important job. _In My Father's House_ is a very powerful book.

   I recommend that you buy a copy of this book rather than borrowing it or checking it out from the library. As your glance flits across your bookshelves, perhaps a slight smile will come to your face as you notice the familiar spine peeking out at you. I return to my copy frequently and have repeatedly drawn from it for Sunday School lessons and devotional topics. _In My Father's House_ would be a valuable addition to your book collection.




5. This book is simple and to the point and beautifully written. It gives the reader the insight of how human Corrie Ten Boom was and yet how much she relied on God for her direction. It is filled with humor and innocence as Corrie recounts her childhood memories, but always making it a point to let the reader know that the main focus is God. The delightful stories will stick in your memory bank. It was a very delightful book which I shall cherish and re-read in years to come.

3 comments about Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance.

1. As someone who has spent years in Vilna, I know of the places which Michael Bart studied and Laurel Corona then wrote about. Mr. Bart did lengthy and in-depth work and Ms. Corona took that research in combination with her own visit to Vilna and research to turn Until Our Last Breath into a must-read. I have been fortunate enough to meet former Jewish partisans, Righteous Gentiles, and those rescued. After reading this book, I realize how much I missed by never having met Michael Bart's parents. They were real people cast into a surreal situation. No matter how inhumane conditions became, both of them managed to hold onto their humanity. They were heroes who never realized how extraordinary they were. The world is a far better place thanks to what they did. What they did was never surrender in the face of insanity and cruelty. If only all of us could be so strong. Thanks to Michael Bart for all of his efforts. Thanks also to Laurel Corona for putting the story down on paper so it can be shared with the world.



2. Holocaust histories are notoriously difficult to read- the subject matter is after all one of the darkest chapters in human history. Thus, Authors are challenged to not only present this history accurately, but also do so in a manner that encourages the reader to continue on. Michael Bart and Laurel Corona have really done a splendid job in bringing us this important book- which follows the story of Michael's parents during their time in the Vilna Ghetto and then as Jewish Partisans in the Rudnicki forest. Meticulously researched and footnoted, the book gives us a historically accurate, yet vivid account of what the Holocaust looked like to a young couple, married in the midst of horror and their subsequent road of survival, liberation and rebirth.



3. This book is absolutely incredible, weaving in a historical sense and perspective alongside the true story of a family's struggle in the ghettos of the holocaust. I read through this so quickly and could easily go back to re-read and focus on references to the larger history of Jews during WWII.
   
   Very inspiring, uplifting and emotional.

2 comments about The Human Race.

1. "Weg! -get the hell out of the way! -he said to me in a rasping voice. I shrugged it off ... but I still existed, and I shrugged it off ... the insults of these people are no more able to reach us than they are able to get their hands on the nightmare we have become in their brains: for all their denying of us we are still there." (p. 51)
   
   These victimizers could live next to you, could walk by you any given day on the streets, they are not German, they are human of any nationality, in this case Spanish: "Sometimes the SS man laughs and jokes with the doctor. And yet, before he was given the job, the SS used to beat him. But now he wears a white coat; he sleeps in a small heated room; he doesn't have to go to roll call; and he eats, and he's pink ... the Spanish doctor rapidly turned into a particularly good example of the kommando's aristocracy." It makes one ashamed to be Spanish, human. And there's no such thing as sin, they say.
   
   It's a hard read because of its sadness, hellish misery, absence of what well-intentioned people call humanity but is nothing but sin and evil. The author cries his soul out, pours his deepest self in words of sorrow, in pages that seek comprehension, but from whom? The author does not say. If its from his readers no help can be given him now.
   
   This is the best account of the experiences of a man in a nazi prison camp during the European Holocaust. Buch better than the popular Primo Levi book. This is a deep, slow-paced, intellectual, thinking-man's guide to survival in Holocaust Europe. There are detailed descriptions of ways of feeling, of sentiments and relationships that are tacit, hard to describe, but which the author in his characteristic French style achieves perfectly.
   
   I strongly recommend to read this book, with a little patience. It takes its time to get into it fully, to grasp the implications and all the meaning of what's going on physically -but specially- psychologically. The book is not spiritual, because there's no spiritual faith. But if humanity is not enough to account for the gravity of the things told here, then who or what to appeal to? If we trust in man alone, and man does these things, then who are we to appeal to? It would be an useless exercise of intellect.



2. This is the best and most moving account I've ever read of life in a concentration camp, better by far than Primo Levi, better even than Viktor Frankl, and better even than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, all of which are saying a lot. The book pulled me into the daily life in a way I've not encountered so strongly before. Antelme has a gift for providing details that immerse the reader in the experience, and he has a novelist's skill with characterization. This is a powerful, meaningful work.

2 comments about A Brush With Death : An Artist in the Death Camps (Suny Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture).

1. This review is hardly unbiased. The author, Morris Wysogrod, a commerical artist by trade, is my cousin and quite truly, a hero of mine. Whenever I visit my Cousin Morris' apartment, I am greeted as soon as I step off the elevator with genuine warmth and enthusiasm. His smile,unbreaking and his conversation,always scintillating, I am amazed at his sincerity and good nature despite what he has witnessed and experienced as a Holocaust survivor.

   His warmth and love for his fellow man is evident throughout his memoir. Morris provides a vivid look at pre-war Poland and the lives that were stolen from our families. And, much as he greets his guests with genuine warmth and affection today, he treats each character in his book with similar respect and reverence.

   His memory is outstanding as he remembers the many personalities and every day people of his Warsaw youth, and later in the death camps. His descriptions are detailed and he suceeds in bringing out the special qualities of each character. This is so important because more often than not, the people he describes with such affection will soon be dead at the hands of the Nazis. Much of Holocaust literature refers to the millions who were massacred. Morris didn't know the millions but he pays beautiful homage to the hundreds who crossed his path.

   From homage to carnage, Morris's story takes us into the Nazi occupation and his incarceration in several death camps. Similar to his skills in painting a picture of his pre-war youth, he is equally and shockingly vivid in his memories of the camps. The brutality, anguish, and sheer inhumanity he witnessed is brought to life as only a man of his artistic talents can do.

   And in the midst of the brutality, there is the friendships, the shared moments, and the appreciation for his fellow prisoners that is necessary for the reader to grasp onto so that he or she may continue with the chilling chronicle of Morris' survival.

   A Brush With Death has warmth, beauty and brutality. It is one of the many stories of the Holocaust experience, and one which I am confident will provide a unique perspective to the most horrific period in recorded history.




2. As a fellow survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Budzyn concentration camp, I can attest the accuracy of the author's harrowing descriptions of his experiences.

   I am amazed at the author's ability to recall so many details. He writes from the heart, without artifice. His spare drawings provide haunting illustrations of what words can't always describe on their own.

   Read this book. You will be moved.