A comic novel set in Auschwitz is always going to be a hard feat to pull off but Amis' thrilling virtuosity with language quickly overrides all misgivA comic novel set in Auschwitz is always going to be a hard feat to pull off but Amis' thrilling virtuosity with language quickly overrides all misgivings. In fact Amis' comedy works better at evoking the sheer insanity of the Nazis than the gravitas of the soul searching later in the novel. The story revolves around the commandant's difficult relationship with his wife and the challenge a serial womaniser, a nephew of Martin Bormann, sets himself to seduce her. All the insane horror of the camp is thus a backdrop to an elaborate tussle of sexual pride. I can think of few writers who write better than Amis does....more
After reading Sarah Helm's brilliant non-fiction account of Ravensbruck, the Nazi concentration camp for women, I was curious to discover how it mightAfter reading Sarah Helm's brilliant non-fiction account of Ravensbruck, the Nazi concentration camp for women, I was curious to discover how it might be depicted in fiction. It's quickly apparent that the author's natural bent is for chick lit which throughout the novel makes appearances like damp on a wall and most apparent in the American character and her love affair with "the most beautiful man in the world". It takes most of the novel to understand what she's even doing in this book. Her other two narrators are a fictitious Polish girl, one of the "rabbits" operated on at the camp and the only female Nazi doctor at the camp. This is a real woman she's depicting and possibly the Nazi who most horrified me in the non-fiction account of Ravensbruck. It therefore was a brave move to try to get inside her mind. I can't say the author succeeded as she remains shadowy and there's little insight into how she could carry out such barbaric cruelty. The depiction of the Polish prisoner though is very good, especially her embittered unlikeability after the war. Nowhere near as harrowing as Sarah Helm's book but it's very well researched and written. ...more
Sarah Helm's brilliant book about Vera Atkinson and her SOE activities involved researching the Ravensbruck concentration camp where some of Vera's agSarah Helm's brilliant book about Vera Atkinson and her SOE activities involved researching the Ravensbruck concentration camp where some of Vera's agents were taken. No doubt this was the catalyst that inspired her to write this book about the camp itself. This is a remarkably researched and constructed book. So vividly does the author bring the camp alive that practically you are living alongside these women many of whom she has personally interviewed. She gives as many names to the tens of thousands of women incarcerated as she can. This proves impossible with the many German women considered by the Nazis as asocials or criminals. I didn't know women were gassed at Ravensbruck or that women were used as guinea pigs for unspeakably cruel medical experiments. Much about this book is eye-opening. As always with books like this there are poignant and obscene footnotes - the daughter of a German guard who gasses herself when she discovers what her mother did at the camp, the Russian women who survived the camp only to be imprisoned in gulags by Stalin after the war and the man who organised Red Cross buses and rescued 7000 women who was assassinated in 1947 by an extreme Zionist group because he worked for the UN as a mediator in the Arab-Israeli war. No nation comes out well in this story. There are good and bad of every nationality, every race. Rarely have I been made to feel just how deeply and grotesquely war brutalises some ordinary human beings while inspiring awesome depths of courage and generosity in others. I guess one reason we find war so fascinating is that it takes human beings to the outermost limits of their nature, both for good and evil. ...more
Trieste is a work of documentary fiction about Holocaust survivors. The author invents a female Jewish character who has a child by a Nazi. One day whTrieste is a work of documentary fiction about Holocaust survivors. The author invents a female Jewish character who has a child by a Nazi. One day while her back is turned the baby is snatched from its pram. What happened to him remains a consuming mystery to her throughout her long life. Hana discovers the child's father is an SS officer. A monster who reigned at various death camps, including Treblinka. Her desire to track down her son take her deeper and deeper into the incomprehensible insanity of Nazism. Her son, we learn, was snatched as part of the lebensborn project and then adopted by a German family. When his dying mother reveals to him he was adopted he too is constrained to research the holocaust. The text quotes lots of first hand accounts of Nazi atrocities. An incredibly clever and powerful book. ...more
One question that sometimes arises about the Holocaust is, why didn't the Jews put up a fight. The answer to this is simple: they did, whenever the opOne question that sometimes arises about the Holocaust is, why didn't the Jews put up a fight. The answer to this is simple: they did, whenever the opportunity arose. And the most famous fight they put up was in the Warsaw Ghetto when they repelled the German army for a month. This novel details life in the ghetto through the eyes of a middle aged man estranged from his family and faith and a young aspiring ballerina of a well-to-do family. For as long as possible both Max and Ala try to cling to their pre-war aspirations and dignity but then arrive the depravities of the deportations and the eventual, momentary euphoric, uprising. It's an exhilarating moment when the Jewish fighters mount a surprise attack on an arrogant and unsuspecting SS division and drive them back out of the ghetto. Hate, as we all know, breeds hate and this novel shows how decent peace-loving individuals can become vengeful killers when treated without even a slither of human regard. A thoroughly engrossing read. ...more
The first time I've ever been the first person to rate or review a book. And it's not as if it's new. It was published in English translation in 1951.The first time I've ever been the first person to rate or review a book. And it's not as if it's new. It was published in English translation in 1951. Ascent to Heaven is four long short stories all set in Poland during WW2 and all featuring a Jewish main character. As I understand it the author himself lived through the events he describes. Rudnicki writes really well and is clearly a very intelligent man. A man who perhaps writes from the head rather than the heart. All the stories are about the desperate measures Jews take to evade the hunters, whether German Nazis, Ukrainian militia or Polish blackmailers. There are lots of fantastic passages of writing but none of the stories quite had that Wow factor for me. Still though very much an edifying read. ...more
Adina Blady Szwajger's memoir of her life in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation reads like an interview. She was old and ill when she finally decided tAdina Blady Szwajger's memoir of her life in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation reads like an interview. She was old and ill when she finally decided to tell her story and she does it without any filters or artistry often admitting to being confused about chronology and detail. There's a sense of both rawness and hurry as if she's frightened of dying before finishing her story. She was a nurse in one of the children's hospitals in the ghetto and after the deportations and the uprising worked for the Jewish underground outside the ghetto. Her young husband can't stand the strain of hiding anymore and when the Gestapo offer a limited number of Jews passage to Palestine for a large sum of money he volunteers. All these Jews were taken immediately to Auschwitz.
Five stars all the way to Adina who comes across as an amazing young woman. However, I think this is a book for readers who already have some knowledge of the events in Warsaw during WW2 and not a good place to start because of its fragmented nature. She explains at the end why she didn't try to write her memoirs earlier and you realise just how heavy a burden her memories have been to her throughout her life. ...more
More interesting than riveting. The official blurb goes into so much detail I don't think I could do a better job - East West Street looks at the persMore interesting than riveting. The official blurb goes into so much detail I don't think I could do a better job - East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity," both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, "the little Paris of Ukraine," a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. It begins in 2010 and moves backward and forward in time, from the present day to twentieth-century Poland, France, Germany, England, and America, ending in the courtroom of the Palace of Justice at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University, welcomed as the first international law academic to give a lecture there on such subjects in fifty years. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who'd moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author's mother), and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy, with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered, clue by clue, the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather's mysterious life and of his flight first to Vienna and then to Paris, and of his mother's journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation, Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men-Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht-each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather's birth, each of whom had come to be considered the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book, Sands looks at who these two very private men were, and at how and why, coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city, studying at the same university, each developed the theory he did, showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal concept-"genocide" and "crimes against humanity"-as a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together, in October 1945 in Nuremberg-Rafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice, with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command, prisoner number 7, Hans Frank, who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg, among them, the families of the author's grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation. The claim that it changes the way we look at the world is obviously hyperbole but, like I said, it was interesting. 3.5 stars. ...more
I didn't manage to finish this. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Essentially, this book has one central premise. That Germany as a naI didn't manage to finish this. I found it very repetitive and overly haranguing. Essentially, this book has one central premise. That Germany as a nation was murderously antisemtic long before the Nazis came to power, dating back in fact to Martin Luther's hate-spewing speeches and beyond and that it's erroneous to single out the Nazis instead of making culpable the entire German population as being responsible for the Holocaust. That its erroneous to believe the Nazis were capable of brainwashing an entire nation that wasn't already predisposed to embrace a hatred of Jews. The author does an admirable job in researching how "ordinary" Germans behaved during the war. This isn't the first book I've read on the subject and I have to say it's depressing how widespread racial hatred for the Jews was in Germany even among so called intelligent, sophisticated people. You might say Kristallnacht was like a litmus test for the Nazis to test the response of "ordinary" Germans to their Jewish policy. The vast majority stood by and laughed. However, the author dismisses rather too opportunistically the notion that in a police state opposition isn't an option by singling out a few Nazi policies that did meet with opposition - the banning of crosses from schools for example. That may be true but it can't be denied that the Nazis were masters at instilling terror. He focuses a lot on the police battalions, often middle aged men who didn't belong to the Nazi party but who had no problem murdering Jews, even women, children and the infirm elderly. However, I began to have a problem with the author singling out Germans for antisemitism. The truth is, there was a predisposition to treat Jews like parasites throughout Europe at that time. Were Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians on the whole any better than the Germans? It's difficult to think of more than a few European countries where the general population harboured a decent humane view of the Jews. So, yes the author makes some important points in helping us to understand the incomprehensible but he does tend to make the same point over and over again and with increasing vehemence, like a man bringing his fist down continually on his desk. Racial hatred is unfortunately a widespread virus that is always awaiting an opportunity to break out. It has no nationality. It can begin its hateful work anywhere. To single out Germans in this manner felt naïve and overly simplistic to me. ...more
Treblinka purports to be a non fiction book but actually reads like a novel. Half of it consists of dialogue which obviously is all invented. That saiTreblinka purports to be a non fiction book but actually reads like a novel. Half of it consists of dialogue which obviously is all invented. That said, Steiner is a very good writer and the novelistic form certainly serves to crank up the tension. I've since read that his book has been dismissed as fiction by at least one survivor of the events he describes. Therefore, it's a hard book to rate. In his favour he did interview an awful lot of people involved. And reading about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising I came to mistrust eye witness accounts. A recurring theme was how many Germans were being slaughtered which always seemed exaggerated and more the result of wishful thinking than fact. It also implied the Jews were well-armed. For me the uprising was such a heroic act of defiance largely because the Jews were very poorly armed and yet still managed to hold the Germans back for a month. It's irrelevant how many Germans they did or did not kill. So, Treblinka is a riveting read and without question provides innumerable insights into how both the Jews working there and their guards behaved. We'll probably never know how many liberties it takes with the truth because so few inmates survived and those who did were peripheral to the revolt itself. There's a preface by Simone de Beauvoir which attests to its quality - "The author has not attempted to do the work of a historian. Each detail is substantiated by the written or oral testimony he has collected and compared. But he has not denied himself a certain directorial freedom." Of course, there's a contradiction there. If not the work of an historian what is it? I confess I'm a little baffled. ...more
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