Publication date: 1998-09-30
Dewey code: 940.5318092
RRP: £11.77
Price: £21.45
Review No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War (National Book Award Finalist) / William Morrow:Nominated for a 1998 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War is Anita Lobel's gripping memoir of surviving the Holocaust. A Caldecott-winning illustrator of such delightful picture books as On Market Street, it is difficult to believe Lobel endured the horrific childhood she did. From age five to age 10, Lobel spent what are supposed to be carefree years hiding from the Nazis, protecting her younger brother, being captured and marched from camp to camp, and surviving completely dehumanising conditions. A terrifying story by any measure, Lobel's memoir is all the more haunting as told from the first-person, child's-eye view. Her girlhood voice tells it like it is, without irony or even complete understanding, but with matter-of-fact honesty and astonishing attention to detail, carving vivid, enduring images into readers' minds. On hiding in the attic of the ghetto: "We were always told to be very quiet. The whispers of the trapped grown- ups sounded like the noise of insects rubbing their legs together". On being discovered while hiding in a convent: "They lined us up facing the wall. I looked at the dark red bricks in front of me and waited for the shots. When the shouting continued and the shots didn't come, I noticed my breath hanging in thin puffs in the air. [+]" On trying not to draw the Nazis' attention: "I wanted to shrink away. To fold into a small invisible thing that had no detectable smell. No breath. No flesh. No sound. " It is a miracle that Lobel and her brother survived on their own in this world that any adult would find unbearable. Indeed, and appropriately, there are no pretty pictures here, and adults choosing to share this story with younger readers should make themselves readily available for explanations and comforting words. (The camps are full of excrement and death, all faithfully recorded in direct, unsparing language. ) But this is a story that must be told, from the shocking beginning when a young girl watches the Nazis march into Krakow, to the final words of Lobel's epilogue: "My life has been good. I want more. " (Ages 10 to 16) -Brangien Davis, Amazon. com.
Publication date: 1998-02-16
Price: £15.99
Review Heshel's Kingdom / Hamish Hamilton Ltd:In 1919 a Lithuanian rabbi named Heshel Melamed unexpectedly died, leaving behind a widow and nine young children. A tragedy, surely. Yet his death, in forcing his penniless family to emigrate to South Africa, inadvertently saved their lives, for between 1941 and 1945, 95 per Cent of the Lithuanian Jewish population were executed by the Nazis and unbearably, their Lithuanian "assistants". There can be little doubt that Heshel and his family would have been murdered, and this is the starting point for Dan Jacobson, the grandson of Heshel; "By evoking the shadow of my grandfather, I hope to discover elements in his life and mine which are now hidden from me". Heshel's Kingdom, in part, is an account of Jacobson's pilgrimage with his son to Lithuania. They find little remaining pre-1941; however, his novelistic eye takes in the topography of the landscape, and his systematic rendering of it in prose-the numerous bridges, dusty tracks- -is the process he discovers for absorbing something of the environs Heshel would have known. Time is a constant theme, present in the irrecoverable nature of the past, and the ironical prism of perspective Jacobson has at his disposal. As the book draws to its close his tone, which has been masterfully terse and angular, takes on a barely suppressed, glacial anger as he visits one massacre site after another, meeting each village's "one surviving Jew". He identifies the legacy of the Nazis to present day Germans as a suspicion of themselves which may never completely vanish; the overriding legacy of Heshel to his grandson was his life. With this challengingly personal book-not autobiography, travel journal, history tome or detective story, though with elements of them all-Jacobson offers something back to his past, and also to a universal present. [+]-David Vincent.
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2004-06-01
Dewey code: 615.822092
RRP: £11.50
Price: £7.08
Review Man with the Miraculous Hands: The Fantastic Story of Felix Kersten, Himmler's Private Doctor (Classics of War Series) / Burford Books,U.S.:
Publication date: 2002-04-15
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £16.99
Price: £36.95
Review Saved by My Face: A True Story of Courage and Escape in War-torn Poland / Mainstream Publishing:
Publication date: 1993-11
Dewey code: 940.5318
RRP: £14.72
Price: £24.85
Review The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust / Fawcett Books:
Publication date: 2005-09-13
Dewey code: 940.5318092
RRP: £12.95
Price: £8.53
Review From Lwow to Parma (Library of Holocaust Testimonies) / Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd:
Creator: J. Steinberg
Publication date: 1990-02-28
Dewey code: 940.53180943155
Price: £17.95
Review Outcast: Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin / Froom Intl Pub:
Publication date: 2006-10-12
Dewey code: 940.531835092
RRP: £16.50
Price: £11.61
Review Deadly Carousel: A Singer's Story of the Second World War / Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2007-03-15
Dewey code: 940.5318092
RRP: £17.50
Price: £13.24
Review East of Time (Alabama Fire Ant) (Alabama Fire Ant) / The University of Alabama Press:
Publication date: 2003-03
Dewey code: 940.5318092
Price: £10.72
Review Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's) / Feminist Press:
Creator: Linda Coverdale
Publication date: 2000-10
Dewey code: 940.5318092
Price: £13.74
Review Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning / Metropolitan Books:
Publication date: 1995
Review MANIA'S ANGEL MY LIFE STORY / MARIE BRANDSTETTER:
Creator: Peter Linenthal
Publication date: 2002-11
Dewey code: 974.7100492400922
RRP: £5.20
Price: £13.45
Review Grandma Esther Remembers: A Jewish-American Family Story (What Was It Like, Grandma?) / Millbrook Press:
Edition: illustrated edition
Publication date: 2003-10-01
Dewey code: 282.092
RRP: £10.76
Price: £17.95
Review Hitler's Pope / Penguin Books Ltd:In the early 1990s, John Cornwell undertook a study of one of the most controversial Popes in Catholic history: Pope Pius XII. Known as the "icebox Pope", Pius XII, the Roman born Eugenio Pacelli, was elected Pope on the eve of the Second World War and ruled with unprecedented power and autocracy until his death at the height of the Cold War in 1958. Pacelli refashioned the role of Pope as a position of unrivalled absolutist power, in his papal edicts and dealings with the most influential figures in 20th-century history, from Hitler and Stalin to Roosevelt and Churchill. Most controversially, Pius was accused of contributing to the fate of the Jews under the Nazis in his sympathetic dealings with Hitler as papal nuncio to Germany throughout the 1920s. The result of Cornwell's decision to write about Pius is his magnificent and shocking book Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. The author explains that he had initially set out to vindicate Pius's career and as a result obtained access to hitherto restricted documents held at the Vatican. The results of his research, however, left him "in a state I can only describe as moral shock. " Cornwell's study "told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. [+]from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy towards the Jews. his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler's regime and thwarted the Final Solution. " The subsequent account is an engrossing read, revealing a picture of a fascinating but repellent figure, who fashioned an aura of saintliness in the pursuit of ever greater power and authority. Wherever an authoritarian or reactionary decision was taken by the Church Pacelli was there, signing the Serbian Concordat that aided the onset of the First World War, signing the Reich Concordat with Hitler in 1933, trivialising the Holocaust and even supporting Croatian Fascism throughout the Second World War. Hitler claimed that the Concordat of 1933 would help the Nazis "in the developing struggle against the international Jewry", a situation compounded by Pius's destruction of Catholic opposition to Nazism and refusal to speak out against the Holocaust. Hitler's Pope brilliantly captures the ascetic, fastidious Pius, from his hypochondria and querulousness to his offhand anti-semitic and racist remarks-such as his request that the Allies should desist from deploying "coloured" soldiers in the relief of Rome in 1944. Cornwell is "convinced that the cumulative verdict of history shows him not to be a saintly exemplar for future generations, but a deeply flawed human being from whom Catholics, and our relations with other religions, can best profit by expressing our sincere regret. " - Jerry Brotton.
Publication date: 1967-06
Dewey code: 949.2071092
Price: £21.48
Review The Diary of a Young Girl / Amereon Limited:
Creator: Naomi Berger
Edition: 1
Publication date: 2001-04-30
Dewey code: 940.5318
Price: £21.50
Review Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (Religion, Theology and the Holocaust): Reflections by Children ... (Religion, Theology and the Holocaust) / Syracuse University Press:
Creator: Malcolm Sparkes
Publication date: 2000-06-29
RRP: £14.00
Price: £8.00
Review I Was Writing This Diary for You, Sasha / Day Books:
Creator: Remkes Kooistra
Publication date: 2001-12
Dewey code: 940.53180922
RRP: £12.99
Price: £5.40
Review Where Was God?: The Lives and Thoughts of Holocaust and World War II Survivors / Mosaic Press:
Publication date: 1991-11
Dewey code: 943.84004924
Price: £10.99
Review Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelbaum / Schocken Books:
Creator: Claus Sibyll
Publication date: 1984-06
Dewey code: 943.0860924
Price: £4.55
Review Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police / Random House Inc (P):
| Models & Brands:
No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War (National Book Award Finalist), Heshel's Kingdom, Man with the Miraculous Hands: The Fantastic Story of Felix Kersten, Himmler's Private Doctor (Classics of War Series), Saved by My Face: A True Story of Courage and Escape in War-torn Poland, The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, From Lwow to Parma (Library of Holocaust Testimonies), Outcast: Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin, Deadly Carousel: A Singer's Story of the Second World War, East of Time (Alabama Fire Ant) (Alabama Fire Ant), Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's), Speak You Also: A Survivor's Reckoning, MANIA'S ANGEL MY LIFE STORY, Grandma Esther Remembers: A Jewish-American Family Story (What Was It Like, Grandma?), Hitler's Pope, The Diary of a Young Girl, Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (Religion, Theology and the Holocaust): Reflections by Children ... (Religion, Theology and the Holocaust), I Was Writing This Diary for You, Sasha, Where Was God?: The Lives and Thoughts of Holocaust and World War II Survivors, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelbaum, Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police |
