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At the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival - mental, moral, and physical - through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual's fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision.
The Long Night is Ernst Israel Bornstein's first-hand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others.
Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left-their lives, and those of their unborn babies.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly", tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War.
Imagine being a 13-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family - life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann, who was 13 years old in March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. It describes her descent into the hell of Auschwitz, a concentration camp where, because of her golden braids, she was selected for work instead of extermination. In intimate, excruciating details she recounts what it was like.
In 1942 one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw Ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them.
At the Mind's Limits is the story of one man's incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival - mental, moral, and physical - through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual's fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision.
The Long Night is Ernst Israel Bornstein's first-hand account of what he witnessed in seven concentration camps. Written with remarkable insight and raw emotion, The Long Night paints a portrait of human psychology in the darkest of times. Bornstein tells the stories of those who did all they could do to withstand physical and psychological torture, starvation, and sickness, and openly describes those who were forced to inflict suffering on others.
Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left-their lives, and those of their unborn babies.
Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly", tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War.
Imagine being a 13-year-old girl in love with boys, school, family - life itself. Then suddenly, in a matter of hours, your life is shattered by the arrival of a foreign army. This is the memoir of Elli Friedmann, who was 13 years old in March 1944, when the Nazis invaded Hungary. It describes her descent into the hell of Auschwitz, a concentration camp where, because of her golden braids, she was selected for work instead of extermination. In intimate, excruciating details she recounts what it was like.
In 1942 one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw Ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them.
In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication.
Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism.
Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman, so she went underground.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong?
In KL, Wachsmann fills this glaring gap in our understanding. He not only synthesizes a new generation of scholarly work, much of it untranslated and unknown outside of Germany, but also presents startling revelations, based on many years of archival research, about the functioning and scope of the camp system.
As a young girl in 14th-century Norway, Kristin is deeply devoted to her father, Lavrans, a kind and courageous man. But when as a student in a convent school she meets the charming and impetuous Erlend Nikulaussøn, she defies her parents in pursuit of her own desires. Her saga continues through her marriage to Erlend, their tumultuous life together raising seven sons as Erlend seeks to strengthen his political influence, and finally their estrangement as the world around them tumbles into uncertainty.
A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.
Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind, where they would come face-to-face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in San Francisco, one of seven siblings raised by Yemeni immigrants in a tiny apartment. At age 24, unable to pay for college, he works as a doorman. Until: a statue of an Arab raising a cup of coffee awakens something in him. He sets out to learn the rich history of coffee in Yemen and the complex art of tasting and identifying varietals. He travels to Yemen, collects samples of beans, eager to bring improved cultivation methods to the farmers. And he is on the verge of success when civil war engulfs Yemen in 2015 and he is trapped in Sana'a.
It's 1939, and Mary, a young socialite, is determined to shock her blueblood political family by volunteering for the war effort. She is assigned as a teacher to children who were evacuated from London and have been rejected by the countryside because they are infirm, are mentally disabled, or - like Mary's favorite student, Zachary - have colored skin.
Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world - only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at 18 is arranged, and several children soon follow.
"You might come back, because you're young, but I will not come back." (Marceline Loridan's father to her, 1944)
A runaway best seller in France, But You Did Not Come Back has already been the subject of a French media storm and hailed as an important new addition to the library of books dealing with the Holocaust. It is the profoundly moving and poetic memoir by Marceline Loridan-Ivens, who, at the age of 15, was arrested in occupied France along with her father. Later, in the camps, he managed to smuggle a note to her, a sign of life that made all the difference to Marceline - but he died in the Holocaust while Marceline survived.
In But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline writes back to her father, the man whose death overshadowed her whole life. Although her grief never diminished in its intensity, Marceline ultimately found her calling working as both an activist and a documentary filmmaker. But now, as France and Europe in general face growing anti-Semitism, Marceline feels pessimistic about the future. Her testimony is a memorial, a confrontation, and a deeply affecting personal story of a woman whose life was shattered and never totally rebuilt.
"My darling little girl..." So begins the short note from father to daughter, scrawled on a torn scrap of paper at great personal risk to its writer and to its bearer, and smuggled out of Auschwitz to young Marceline in her cell block in Birkenau. Much as she treasures the note for as long as she is able to hold on to the physical object itself, she can never afterwards recall the remainder of her father's last words to her. "I try to remember and I can't," she says. "I try, but it's like a deep hole and I don't want to fall in." This haunting memoir (written as one long letter from daughter to the father she lost) is lean and spare, lyrical and lovely even in the horror it describes. It pulls no punches, while overstating nothing. There is no redundancy, no repetition even though it is nonlinear, like poetry, moving fluidly from past to present. That is its only flaw, if the book has one; while the narrator is excellent and does ample justice to the material, a listener may feel a little lost at times. I found it beneficial to review chapters I'd listened to using a print copy, in order to see what exactly had taken place during some of the more fleeting transitions between sections.
One of the things that makes this unique memoir so unforgettable is the perspective of the author, looking back from the vantage point of so many years later upon events that seared their imprint on her mind and on her flesh, both literally and figuratively. "I’m an elderly lady now," she tells the father who never lived to see half the years she has attained, "I'm not afraid to die, I don’t panic. I don’t believe in God, or that there’s anything after death. I’m one of the 160 still alive out of the 2,500 who came back—76,500 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Six million Jews died: in the camps, killed and thrown into mass graves, gassed, shot at point blank range, massacred in the ghettos. Once a month, I have dinner with some friends who survived, we laugh together, even about the camp, in our own way. And I see [a childhood friend and fellow survivor] too. I’ve watched her take teaspoons in cafés and restaurants and slip them into her handbag; she’d been a minister, an important woman in France, an imposing person, but she still hoards worthless teaspoons so she doesn’t have to lap up the terrible soup of Birkenau. If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains permanently within us."
Heartwrenchingly, spoon-stealing is not nearly the most devastating lasting legacy of the Holocaust among its victims. "I never had children. I never wanted any," she tells her father. After the camps, "motherhood had no meaning any more: Babies were the first to be sent to the gas chamber." The camp leaves its mark even on those who never saw its horrors firsthand. Marceline tells her father that two of his other children who escaped capture later went on to take their own lives; they "died from the camps without ever having been there." Perhaps most striking of all are the author's reasons for telling her story now; she does sense that the past is about to repeat itself. "You had chosen France, she isn’t the melting pot you’d hoped for. Everything is getting tense again. We’re called “French Jews”; there are also French Muslims, and here we are, face-to-face—I who had hoped never to take sides, or at least, to simply be on the side of freedom."
Although "writing to you has helped me," she tells her father, the gaping hole that his disappearance left in her spirit can never be filled. She is forced even to admit that "deep down, I don’t know what kind of man you would have been. I feel as if I didn’t really know you. We were separated at the very moment when we would have begun to find out about each other.” The ending is a gut-punch that I cannot quote without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that you will never forget it.
8 of 10 people found this review helpful
“I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us”, that is how Marceline Loridan-Ivens introduces herself to us, but I should say that this is not one of those uplifting, heartwarming, feel good memoirs; it’s not optimistic, spiritually elevating or full of assurances and hope for the future of the human race.
Loridan-Ivens's prose is strikingly factual and unsentimental. I believe that's because she didn't have to amplify her narrative, the reality is that the horrific account of what happened to her and her family speaks by itself.
In March 1944, Marceline Loridan-Ivens and her family were living a quiet but relative sheltered life in Nazi-occupied France. All of this changed when she and her father, Solomon Rozenberg, were captured and sent to Drancy, a location that served as a layover to the extermination camps located in Poland.
Immediately after their arrival the two of them got separated, Solomon was left in Auschwitz while Marceline was sent to Birkenau, a women’s concentration camp. The two places were separated by a mere three kilometers. Marceline was only 16 years old.
One day Marceline and Solomon catch a glimpse of each other. Marceline is euphoric when she sees him but her happiness is short-lived when soldiers savagely beat her into unconsciousness. A few weeks later, Solomon convinces a fellow prisoner to smuggle an onion, a tomato and a short letter for her, all things that were considered unimaginable luxuries in the camp.
Marceline has to make the note disappear so that the camp officers won’t find it on her, the narrative of this memoir is framed around her inability to recall the message her father wrote.
But You Did Not Come Back is Marceline's response to that note, in it she painfully contemplates what Solomon might have written to her and the precious memories she lost.
Later on, Marceline was sent to Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died, and then to a factory where junker planes were manufactured. She was finally liberated in the early summer of 1945. She never heard from his father again.
This book is as much the story of Marceline's horrific experiences at Birkenau, as it is about the challenges she faced trying to readjust to an ordinary life after her return to France.
Last year marked the 70 year anniversary since the Soviets liberated the Birkenau-Auschwitz concentration camps in Poland, but reading Loridan-Ivens account you feel as if that event only took place a little while ago. But You Did Not Come Back: A Memoir is that vivid and emotionally raw.
With its unsparing, bleak prose, this memoir will break your heart; so why should you even consider listening to it? I would say if for nothing else, because it’s gorgeously written, brutally honest and deeply touching.
But there is also this:
6,000,000 Jews died in the Holocaust. 76,500 French Jews were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. 2,500 came back. 160 of them are still living. Marceline is just one of them. We are running out of survivors. Her story needs to be heard because sadly, it's remains very much relevant today.
Karen Cass' narration was absolutely flawless.
4 of 6 people found this review helpful
This book is a must-read. It gets at the very core of what it is to be human and what it is to suffer, to feel pain like most of us have never known. It's imperative that we don't forget, that we immerse ourselves regularly in these types of person-told histories so that we can continue, as conscious individuals, to move forward toward humanity. The author's words are poignant such as only someone who experi
1 of 3 people found this review helpful