Amazon.com
Survival in Auschwitz is a mostly straightforward narrative, beginning with Primo Levi's deportation from Turin, Italy, to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland in 1943. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in the camp. Even Levi's most graphic descriptions of the horrors he witnessed and endured there are marked by a restraint and wit that not only gives readers access to his experience, but confronts them with it in stark ethical and emotional terms: "[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?" --Michael Joseph Gross
Book Description
In 1943, Primo Levi, a twenty-five-year-old chemist and "Italian citizen of Jewish race," was arrested by Italian fascists and deported from his native Turin to Auschwitz. Survival in Auschwitz is Levi's classic account of his ten months in the German death camp, a harrowing story of systematic cruelty and miraculous endurance. Remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, compassion, and even wit, Survival in Auschwitz remains a lasting testament to the indestructibility of the human spirit. Included in this new edition is an illuminating conversation between Philip Roth and Primo Levi never before published in book form.
Customer Reviews:
Non-emotional.......2007-07-07
A monotone, sort of scientific voice. His story is sad...but is told with very little emotion. It was hard to get into - a little harder to read due to the "scientist' type voice that I'm not used to. I found Elie Weisel's "Night" to be a much more candid look inside a survivor's haunted soul. Primo Levi is good for someone who prefers reading something about the Holocaust that is a bit more textbook vs. memoir.
A clinical memoir of the Holocaust -- and that's good.......2007-06-03
A touching, but not mawkish or dramatic, memoir. One realizes the randomness and happenstance by which he survived, and easily accepts the moral dualism of the life of thievery and connivance, within bounds of common decency and collective group self-interest, that kept any survivor alive. Some reviews seemed to fault the book for being unemotional, but one sees how Levi's essentially scientific and objective personality became a key to his survival, and necessarily informs his voice.
The meaning of being 'human'.......2007-01-16
This account of the imprisonment, internment, survival of Primo Levi in Auschwitz is written as a straightforward chronological narrative. Levi recounts his initial capture , the horrendous suffering of the journey of Italian Jews to Auschwitz, the selection there in which all the woman and children were immediately sent to their deaths in the gas- chambers, and in which the able- bodied sent to the work- camp at Buna. Levi tells the story , detail by detail of his getting into the work- order of the Camp. He describes in clear precise language the horrible humiliations the prisoners were subject to. He also describes in one central chapter, four different kinds of survivors, and the strategies they use to escape death. His accounts of his own getting through to the liberation include his appreciations of his friend Albert, and a few other individuals who with no reward to expect for it, helped him on the way.
The bestiality of the Nazis and their helpers is not sermonized about, but rather portrayed in specific incidents of unusual terrible cruelty.
Levi is deeply concerned with the whole question of what it means to be human , and how it is possible to retain human dignity in the most extreme circumstances.
His carefully written record of his own horrifying experience is to this day considered one of the most moving and effective of Holocaust memoirs.
Book Review for Survival in Auschwitz.......2007-01-13
The book Survival in Auschwitz is by Primo Levi. It is about a twenty-five year old chemist named Primo Levi, who is an Italian citizen of the Jewish race. He was captured by Italian Fascists in 1943 and was transported to a concentration camp in Auschwitz where he spent 10 months known as Haftling 174517. At the concentration camps they were authorized to build a Buna- a rubber processing plant. Those who were unable to work were immediately killed. Those who worked in the "Lagers" had a better chance of living because the Germans decided that the Jews in the lagers would be more of use alive than dead. Levi who works in the lager talks about how some people would trade possessions such as clothing, spoons, bowls, shoes etc. for rations of bread or food in the lagers. Those who got injured in work in the lagers were sent to Ka-Be. Ka-Be is the abbreviation of Krankenbau, which is a temporary infirmary. Those who seem to get better at Ka-Be were sent back to work and those who seem to get worse are sent from Ka-Be to the gas chambers. Later on in this book Levi and two other chemists were authorized to work in the labs. This job had some benefits. They were given a new shirt and were to work indoors, rather than out in the winter weather, and this job wasn't strenuous.
This is a book about survival. I dint like this book too much. I found this book hard to understand at some points and most of the German words are hard to pronounce. I would recommend this book to people who have interest in World War 2 or the Holocaust.
Great book on the Holocaust.......2006-12-19
Ever since I first studied the Holocaust in the eighth grade, I love reading and listening to the stories of the people who were in the Holocaust. This is the first Holocaust book that I read. I first read this book when I was in high school. This is one of my favorite Holocaust books.
Book Description
Filip Muller's firsthand account of three years in the gas chambers. One of the few prisoners who saw the Jewish people die and lived to tell about it, Muller has written one of the key documents of the Holocaust. A very detailed description of day-to-day life, if we can call it that, in Hell's inmost circle...jammed with infernal information too terrible to be taken all at once. --Terrence Des Pres, New Republic
Customer Reviews:
Tough but necessary read.........2007-09-21
It is hard to read this book because the subject matter is so grim. It is not written especially well but the unique view of the author makes this an important document. It is clear that the Nazi plan developed over time and it was truly a murder machine. This story from inside the machine is sad and ultimately worth reading and remembering.
Most graphic and gripping.......2007-09-02
Since my tour of duty in Augsburg and Schwaebish Hall W. Germany (mid-60's) I have read fifty books trying to undersand the holocaust. I found the German people warm and generous, thus was unable to put the two continums in the same world.
This book does not help you understand the reasoning behind that most powerful historical event, but it does give you an extremely graphic picture of HOW it was done on a day to day basis.
Filip Mueller, saw things that Hoess (Commandant of Auschwitz) did not see first hand and he tells it all.
Great read.
should be read by everyone.......2007-06-12
Highly recommended. Gripping, suspenceful. Manages to unnerve, shock, without hysterics--and this is the best type of approach for something this gruesome.
How did the author live through it? How would you have dealt with it? How would I?
Get it. Read it.
And for those who think by simply saying NEVER AGAIN that it won't, couldn't happen again, are only fooling themselves. Humans never learn a damn thing from history. Why? Because we're basically retarded.
It could happen again, and in fact, it has happened--to a lesser degree. I say any time a Hitler or Saddam wannabe rears his ugly head--you better believe there are a few of them out there even right now--confront
the control-hungry pissant to keep him from attaining enough power to reach his objective.
Sad but True .......2007-02-18
As I am an avid reader, and am highly intrested in WW2, I bought this book, not to be disapointed. It literally took me only two days to finish because of my intregment. It is a very good read, giving you the true story of what innocent people went through as a result of racism. The book is very graphic, interesting, but terribly sad at the same time. Overall, is a must-read. I highly recomend this book.
Bone Chilling.......2007-01-29
Read this and live the horror of the Holocaust. You will cry but come away the wiser.
Book Description
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
Download Description
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."
Customer Reviews:
Great description of events!!.......2007-08-23
This book is great so far. I'm only 4 chapters into it, but I enjoy reading it a lot. It really paints a picture of the accounts involved at Auschwitz. I read this book just before I go to bed and I have a hard time putting it down. If you've read any of the other books I have and enjoyed them and you enjoy reading about real life events, this book is for you!!
The factory of death........2007-04-07
The author was the prison doctor/pathologist for the Auschwitz facility. He did the autopsies on dead prison inmates under the demented Dr. Mengle.
This book is a disturbing story. As part of his duties, he also was a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners that disposed of and burned the remains of the bodies killed in the gas chambers. The author was asked to do some terrible things. He revived a gas chamber child, only to find a German guard later shooting her. He examined two cripples and fed them, only to do an autospy on them later in the day. These are very disturbing stories and show the try crime of the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews.
I think the forward puts the author under some focus. The author participated in the Nazi's plans for genocide. He saved his skin while others perished. Better to do as the 12th Sonderkommando did. Fight the people that were killing them. This shows the crimes of the Nazis during the war years.
must-read.......2006-12-29
This author skillfully recounts his mind-blowing, horrifying experience as the doctor of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. He describes the terrible events that occurred during his time at the camp, but also tells about the kindness his fellow prisoners exhibited toward one another in a group effort for survival. It's a riveting tale.
This book is the best Holocaust book I've read.......2006-11-26
This account of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando is the best memoir I have read to date. It was very easy to pick up and read, and was nearly impossible to put down. Dr. Nyiszli is very factual, and gives careful testimony to his time spent in hell. I feel that I've learned more from this one book than I have in all the others I've read combined (as well as my college Holocaust class). Miklos Nyiszli is a hero for bringing this record into the public sphere.
Auschwitz:A Doctor's Eyewitness Account.......2006-10-26
As someone who has read many first-hand Auschwitz accounts, I found this the best. It is a rare look into the everyday functions of a systematic genocide; finely written to include the most interesting information. Also, it includes a personal look into the personality and brutal workings of Dr. Mengele from a viewpoint that no other account can offer.
Customer Reviews:
Rudolph Hoess (Auschwitz Kommandant) and the Clarification of Some Holocaust Misconceptions.......2007-05-31
I give this book five stars because of its historical value. This work not only gives insight into the mind of the leader of perhaps the greatest death factory ever built, but also allows a clearing-up of some errors that have accreted in the decades since that horrible time.
Hoess rejected God and the Church (p. 52-53, 57, 59, 72, 192), having rebelled against his father's wish that he become a priest. Like Himmler, he became an Artaman (pp. 202-203; a communal movement resembling the 1960's US communes, albeit Teutonic-centered) before switching to Nazism for his substitute religion.
Hoess wrote: "Until the beginning of 1942 the main body of prisoners was Polish." (p. 128). Many Poles were murdered secretly (the cause of death listed as natural), "...because of political and security reasons..." (p. 224).
During the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy, attempts were made to belittle the victimhood of Auschwitz Poles through the premise that they, unlike most Jews, were not generally killed upon arrival at Auschwitz. Hoess, in contrast, rejected any such dichotomy (if anything, praising the slow-death genocidal methods--as perfected by the Communists): "The Gestapo delivered the prisoners to the camps to be exterminated. It made no difference to them whether it happened by firing squad, gas, or by the horrible conditions in the camps. It was part of their plan not to improve conditions in the camps...Thus, the concentration camps were changed deliberately, and sometimes unintentionally, into large-scale extermination centers. The Kommandants received extensive composite reports from the Gestapo about the Soviet concentration camps. Escaped prisoners had made reports about the conditions and organization of these camps down to the smallest detail. They emphasized that by using forced labor methods the Soviets were annihilating entire nationalities." (pp. 168-169).
Holocaust-uniqueness advocates sometimes claim that the genocide of the Polish intelligentsia, unlike that of Jews, served a rational purpose--the elimination of resistance. Actually, the latter was, at most, a hoped-for byproduct of this nation-destroying act: "I want to add this, that the general opinion at SS headquarters was that the total annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia would also destroy the resistance movement. [SS Major] Thomsen was an ardent defender of this theory." (p. 322).
Initial plans to kill all Jews gave way to the sparing of some of them for forced labor (p. 34).
Hoess discussed the Jewish Sonderkommando in considerable detail. Those Jews temporarily got to save their lives by dutifully assisting in the deception, gassing, despoiling, and cremation of their fellow Jews. He also observed Jew-against-Jew behavior by some Jews who had no hope of postponing their own deaths. As they entered the gas chambers, they told Germans the addresses of fugitive Jews back home. Hoess commented: "I cannot explain what motivated them to reveal this information. Was it personal revenge, or were they jealous because they did not want the others to live on?" (p. 160).
In common with many Germans, Hoess attempts to rationalize his exterminatory conduct by equating it with the Allied bombings of German women and children. He estimates German civilian casualties in the several millions (p. 171), which is at least a 20-fold exaggeration.
As for lebensraum, Hoess belatedly concluded that Germany could have achieved it peacefully (p. 182).
Hoess suggested that crude propaganda such as Der Sturmer had hindered the development of scientific anti-Semitism (p. 140). He also came to believe that the extermination of Jews only brought hatred against Germany and increased Jewish power by discrediting anti-Semitism (p. 183).
This volume isn't limited to Hoess' memoirs. The entire Wannsee Protocol is printed in translation. It is obvious that the choice of Poland as the site of the German death camps was based solely on practical considerations (minimalized transportation) and had nothing to do with real or stereotyped Polish attitudes towards Jews: "State Secretary Dr. Buehler declared that the government of Occupied Poland would welcome it if the final solution to this question would be started in Occupied Poland. His reason: transport plays no important role here and the deployment of workers during the operation would not cause any problems." (p. 380).
A very good tranlation.......2007-01-06
My opinion is based on the comparison with the orginal publication in German, which I purchased in 1960 to provide essential information for the subsequent psychiatric evaluations of several thousand Holocaust survivors.
Rudolf Hoess' Mistress Interviewed.......2006-10-15
After Dachau was liberated, Army intelligence interviewed a woman at the camp who claimed to have been Rudolf Hoess' mistress while at Auschwitz. What details they could check were confirmed, and her interview became part of a Seventh Army report issued a few weeks later, a report that has been republished as Dachau Liberated: The Official Report (ISBN: 1587420031). For those who want to understand the infamous Hoess, that interview of "E.H." provides a much-needed check on his obviously self-serving autobiography. Here's a short passage from her interview:
"According to my recollection, on December 16, 1942, about 11 p.m. I was already asleep, suddenly the C.O. appeared before me. I hadn't heard the opening of my cell and was such frightened. It was dark in the cell. I believed at first it was an SS man or a prisoner and said, "What is this tomfoolery, I forbid you." Then I heard "Pst," and a pocket lamp was lighted and lit the face of the C.O. I broke out "Herr Kommandant."
Hoess didn't mention this clandestine affair in his autobiography, but details she gave fit with his account and with conditions at Auschwitz.
IT WAS NOT HOESS' FAULT.......2005-05-02
There is another autobiography of Hoess titled "Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess". I would be interested in reading that account but am curious how that could differ from "Death Dealer". Given the circumstances the man at the end of his life did not have a whole lot of time to write different autobiographies. My guess is the two books are essentially the same.
As for Death Dealer itself it is not often one reads an account of the concentration camps from the "other side". I had read other summaries that portrayed Hoess as a mid-level cold-hearted bureaucrat whose account of his SS career was pretty much emotionless and he treated his activities in the same manner an accountant or a department store manager or a mechanic or (pick a career) would describe their career. I thought before reading the book that whatever one may say about him he would at least not grovel for forgiveness and would defiantly flip his middle finger at the world before climbing the steps of the gallows. After all, when he wrote his memoirs in 1946 and 1947, there was little suspense over what his fate would be. So sugar coating his past was not going to change his future.
Although there may have been some shred of decency in the man one could not escape the feeling that he recognized himself as a war criminal only because his captors called him a war criminal. In other words his "mea culpa" would probably not score high on the sincerity scale. The victorious Allies were the new authorities over his life and if they considered him guilty and a war criminal then he was guilty and a war criminal. Whether he personally thought so or not was not relevant. And that was pretty much how he conducted his life. Whoever his authority was pretty much controlled his life. He was the commandant of the most notorious of all Nazi death camps because his superiors made him the commandant. He killed because he was told to kill -- just as he was to die because he was told he had to die.
He admitted the horrible conditions of Auschwitz -- and other camps. It was not Hoess' fault. His superiors -- starting with Hitler and Himmler -- put impossible demands on him and did not provide adequate resources. The conditions were horrible and only got worse as the war progressed due to the lack of resources due to the stranglehold the Allies put on Germany. It was not Hoess' fault. The inadequate resources included inadequate officers, staff, and guards who committed many atrocities for which he had little or no control. It was not Hoess' fault. The inadequate resources included inadequate building material, latrines, barrack space, food, water, sanitation system, and medical supplies. It was not Hoess' fault. The concentration camp administration reflected the ideals of Thomas Eicke, the founder of the concentration camp system. It was not Hoess' fault.
Although the man blamed others for the nightmarish hell of Auschwitz and other concentration camps he accepted responsibility because it was engrained into him that the commandant is responsible for all activities within the concentration camp.
This may be as close as one may come to reading an account of the "other side". Although one's opinion of the Holocaust may not be altered by Rudolf Hoess he does share insight that one normally does not see about this dark chapter of the history of humanity. Most people know what it is like to be over tasked and under resourced. But most people do not know what it is like to be over tasked and under resourced in his particular career field.
The Final Solution: An Inside View.......2005-04-21
On April 16, 1947, Rudolph Hoess, the infamous Kommandant of Auschwitz was hanged in his former concentration camp for, "crimes against the Polish people." While awaiting trial, Hoess, who knew he would pay for his crimes with his life, sought to renew the spiritual connection he had eschewed as a youth. Accordingly, he recounted his time in the SS for his captors. His story is also that of the darkest side of the Third Reich.
The book begins with a discussion of the, "final solution," of the Jewish Question. He tells how he was ordered to establish a camp at Auschwitz for the purpose of eliminating, "enemies of the state." Details of camp construction and experiments to find the appropriate gas he describes without emotion. Yet he relates questions asked by young SS soldiers and inmates as to how small children could be an "enemy." His "party line" response fooled some, but never himself.
Hoess also describes the victims he tried to destroy. Jews had "strong family ties;" gypsies were, "childlike;" the Jehovah's Witnesses were worthy of emulation. The SS was challenged to have the same devotion to the Fuhrer as they had to Jehovah. In chapter 22 he describes the gassing process as only he could do. His primary concern was to dispatch his victims quickly and efficiently without displaying emotion that would affect young guards. Here, he admits, he hid behind an iron mask. Particularly interesting is the story of a young, extremely attractive, Jewish girl who fought back even as she was undressing for the gas chamber. Resistance was rare but in this case, effective, very effective!
The book describes his early life and the events that caused him and many others to blindly follow the SS motto: "Fuhrer, you order. We obey!" Hoess gives a detailed description of the hierarchy of the SS. Men, who had been portrayed as super-human, are shown to have been far short of that ideal. Alcoholism and suicide rates were high; competence was low! Still, operations continued despite all difficulties because, "Orders were orders!"
Death Dealer is a first person account of the operations of the most infamous death camp in history. After sending an estimated 2.5 million people to their deaths, the Kommandant, ended his life by doing one decent thing: he left his memoirs so no one could deny this ever happened. For that, the world owes Rudoph Hoess, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, a debt of gratitude.
Amazon.com
This book, published months after Italian writer Primo Levi's suicide in 1987, is a small but powerful look at Auschwitz, the hell where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. The book was his third on the subject, following Survival in Auschwitz (1947) and The Reawakening (1963). Removed from the experience by time and age, Levi chose to serve more as an observer of the camp than the passionate young man of his previous work. He writes of "useless violence" inflicted by the guards on prisoners and then concludes the book with a discussion of the Germans who have written to him about their complicity in the event. In all, he tries to make sense of something that--as he knew--made no sense at all.
Book Description
Levi wrote of the moral collapse that occurred in Auschwitz and the fallibility of human memory that allows such atrocities to recur. Levi's last book published before his death in 1987.
Customer Reviews:
As important as a book gets.......2007-08-04
It is redundant to praise this book or describe its background, which has been done very well by other reviewers. This was Levi's final wrestling with the implications of what he called the Lager (he didn't use the term 'Holocaust'), not only as he experienced it, but more generally.
Just a few points that may be less obvious. Levi never uses the phrase "survivor guilt," and his choice of terms was never without consideration. Rather, he uses the term, "shame." The chapter that goes by that name is an enormously subtle and evolving one. Levi continues to probe the feeling as he recalls it after "liberation," and there are at least five different concepts of what that "shame" entailed, no one of which did Levi think was definitive. By the way, none of Levi's definitions are the same as the popular notion of "survivor" guilt - that one feels guilty simply for having survived while others did not. The closest he comes is to talk about surviving "in place of another," which is a more complex idea. It refers specifically to the nature of the camps themselves, a horrific "laboratory," as Levi put it, in which selections, influence, luck and more did mean that one's survival always came at someone else's cost. This is a sociological point. It would not the case, for example, for the survivor of a tornado or earthquake.
Second, the "grey zone" is very often misinterpreted to suggest that perpetrators and victims met in some "middle ground" somewhere. Levi is definitive about this. The responsibility of the killers and the victims are in no sense, and in no context, equivalent. But in the squalid and horrific world that was the lager, there was an enormous range of types and characters. Levi is arguing mostly against what he calls "stereotypes" - convenient simplifications.
Finally, it may be of interest that "the drowned and the saved" was intended by Levi to be the title of his first book, If This is a Man (known in the U.S. as Survival in Auschwitz). His publisher disagreed, although there is a chapter in If This is a Man called Drowned and Saved. Levi's preoccupation with the role in the camp of differences in power, privilege, luck, and alliances-of-convenience runs throughout his work. It is a topic that still deserves much more attention than it has received.
Astonishing and Vivid.......2007-07-12
Primo Levi's final memoir about the Nazi Holocaust is among the most provocative and compelling accounts of the Shoah in the entire literature. Indeed, it is one of the great political memoirs of recent years. Levi was an Italian chemist, anti-Nazi activist, and Jew who was sent to Auschwitz and famously documented the atrocities that he experienced in `Survival at Auschwitz,' one of the first memoirs to be widely read in Germany. This book is a profoundly introspective rumination, not on the particular horrors of the camps, but of their philosophical implications for human beings as a whole. In `The Grey Zone,' Levi explores the moral ambiguity of this moment in history, both in terms of the work of the Kapos and the rare but meaningful resistance from the Germans. Levi is open to the possibility of a moral spectrum, yet he remains unequivocally vociferous in his condemnation of National Socialism, and of the German people's complicity with this movement. There are many striking and haunting moments in `The Drowned and the Saved,' such as Levi's discussion of the Musselman, or the experience of palpable shame on the part of the Jewish victims. This book is a special memoir because Levi refuses to draw the reader via an explicit recollection of the litany of horrors that he experienced, but because he is willing to penetrate into the meaning and truth of the holocaust as human abomination. A true masterpiece, both in approach and in execution.
A must for students of ethics.......2004-09-18
This is a book that causes the reader to reconsider, reflect critically one's own views, marvel at the level of depravity to which humans can steep, and is one which I imagine should be a standard text in ethics courses.
But it also raises questions of memory and the mind"s ability to adjust, amend and retool. Mr Levi must stand as one of that sad century's most astonishing examples of positive human achievement .
Thoughtful, intelligent, meaningful, and universal........2003-01-21
"The Drowned and the Saved" is the final book of Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived the death camp of Auschwitz, and turned to authorship in his later years. This book is a group of a half-dozen related essays, each exploring a specific aspect of Levi's view of the Holocaust's causes and effects.
He begins with the concept of "good faith", wondering whether believing a lie excuses it. He notes that oppressors lie to save themselves from believing they are evil, and victims lie to save themselves from believing they suffer. He explores the moral zone between black and white, noting that anybody can be a tough killer or a foolish victim: we are all tyrants and victims in our own way.
He examines survivor's guilt, and reflects on the roles of luck versus blessing in life, and discusses the ways humans need communication to survive, including the way victims bend language to disguise their intentions, and tyrants twist it to cause confusion among their victims.
He tries to distinguish between rationalized evil and collective madness. He believes the spirit and mind can be injured just as the body can, and wonders how a person's perspective plays a role in their survival and psychological health. He describes the various stereotypes people hold when they imagine the stories of those who lived through WWII, e.g., the romantic hero, the evil Nazi, the prisoner who always plots escape, and so on, but explains why they are rough and inaccurate.
Each chapter is like a conversation with an intelligent and qualified author. It is thoughtful, and a pleasure to read. It reflects on psychological and historical themes which are important not only to our understanding of the Holocaust, but also more generally human nature. (It appears to be a rumination on subjects discussed in his other books, collected and summarized briefly here.) It is for this reason that the book is successful. It considers the Holocaust in particular, but its themes are actually deeper and more universal.
"Letters from Germans", the penultimate chapter, is the book's most powerful, noticeably demonstrating the tension between his memory of that time period, and the memory of various Germans, in their own words. He especially berates those who believe they are doing the right thing by speaking out in shame and guilt over theit past, perhaps attacking them a bit harshly, but certainly with justification. The last chapter, "Conclusion", is its weakest. In the opinion of this reviewer, it over-generalizes, and tries to apply retrospective analysis to the world's future. It also calls for unwarranted conclusions, unrelated to the preceding chapters, and perhaps contradicts itself. Luckily it is brief, and does not detract from the excellence of the prior explorations.
(For example, he says war is unecessary, and mankind can settle all conflicts around a table, but only as long as we are in good faith. He then calls Hitler a buffoon, implying he cannot be taken in good faith. He next says we need not have good faith to negotiate if we are all equally in fear of war, but this sounds like he is saying war is necessary after all, even if only to remind us there are punishments for negotiation in bad faith!)
Despite its conclusion (which many readers will probably enjoy, despite this reviewer's belief it over-reaches), the book is an intelligent and even-handed, but personal assessment of the Holocaust, written in an engaging and intelligent style, with brevity and wit. At 200 pages, it is easy to read. Packed with philosophy and insight, it is worth the investment.
Encourages introspection.......2002-05-03
Primo Levi suggests that perceiving the experiences of others is extremely difficult and grows more so as the distance in time, space, and quality increases. "We are prone to assimilate them to 'related' ones, as if the hunger in Auschwitz were the same as that of someone who has skipped a meal, or as if escape from Treblinka were similar to an esacpe from an ordinary jail."
If you are now living in an affluent democratic society, the book leads you to wonder, "Would I recognize the warning signs? If I were a victim, would I descend into barbarism? If I were not, would I have the courage to speak on their behalf? Would I become a monster?"
Book Description
Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world–only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time–was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946.
Jan Gross’s Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation?
Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war’s aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder–and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach.
Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize—winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland’s Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.
For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.
Praise for Fear
“You read [Fear] breathlessly, all human reason telling you it can’t be so–and the book culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”–Elie Wiesel, The Washington Post Book World
“Bone-chilling . . . [Fear] is illuminating and searing, a moral indictment delivered with cool, lawyerly efficiency that pounds away at the conscience with the sledgehammer of a verdict. . . . Fear takes on an entire nation, forever depriving Poland of any false claims to the smug, easy virtue of an innocent bystander to Nazi atrocities. . . . Gross’ Fear should inspire a national reflection on why there are scarcely any Jews left in Poland. It’s never too late to mourn. The soul of the country depends on it.”–Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Provocative . . . powerful and necessary . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”–Susan Rubin Suleiman, Boston Globe
“Imaginative, urgent, and unorthodox . . . The ‘fear’ of Mr. Gross’s title . . . is not just the fear suffered by Jews in a Poland that wished they had never come back alive. It is also the fear of the Poles themselves, who saw in those survivors a reminder of their own wartime crimes. Even beyond Mr. Gross’s exemplary historical research and analysis, it is this lesson that makes Fear such an important book.”–The New York Sun
“After all the millions dead, after the Nazi terror, a good many Poles still found it acceptable to hate the Jews among them. . . . The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.”
–Kirkus (starred review)
“Gross illustrates with eloquence and shocking detail that the bloodletting did not cease when the war ended. . . . This is a masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”–Booklist (starred review)
“[Fear] tells a wartime horror story that should forces Poles to confront an untold–and profoundly terrifying–aspect of their history.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Customer Reviews:
Compare "Fear" With An Earlier Book By Gross.......2007-08-22
The invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in September of 1939 was an unprovoked partition of the country. It is understood that the Poles were not pleased by the Russian occupation, but it may be thought that the Russian occupation was a minor annoyance compared to the occupation by the Germans. In an earlier book Revolution from Abroad written in his pre-postmodern days, when Gross was an associate professor at Emory, Gross carefully and with excellent documentation shows how wrong this notion was. He wrote (Revolution from Abroad, Princeton Univ. Press, 1st ed., p. 229):
"These very conservative estimates show that the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction. This comparison holds for the first two years of the Second World War, the period before the Nazis began systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population."
Gross shows that, for Polish Catholics, the Soviets were even worse, indeed much worse than the brutal Nazis. Essentially all the Polish professional and semiprofessional classes (doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, managers, foremen, farmers with holding beyond a few acres, etc.) were rounded up by the Soviets and then either killed immediately or retained in prisons for shipments to slave labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. Prison conditions were hellish, worse than those in the Nazi concentration camps. Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 161): "In Lwów, twenty-eight people living in a 11.5 sq. m cell relied on the geometrical skills of a gifted high school student who fitted them most ingeniously by size into an intricate pattern." Sanitary conditions were appalling, with inmates frequently forced to urinate and defecate on the floors of the cells.
What was the situation with the Jews in the lands occupied by the Soviets and what was their attitude to the occupiers? Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 32):
"What Poles and Ukrainians report, often with biting irony, the Jews do not deny: 'Jews greeted the Soviet army with joy. The youth was spending days and evenings with the soldiers. . . Jews received incoming Russians enthusiastically, they [the Russians] also trusted them [the Jews].'"
Again, Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 34, quoting Celina Koninska):
"It is hard to find words to describe the feeling -- this waiting and this happiness. We wondered how to express ourselves -- to throw flowers? To sing? To organize a demonstration? How to show our great joy? I think the Jews awaiting the Messiah will feel, when he finally comes, the way we felt. "
These warm receptions by Jews for the Soviets in eastern Poland were in September of 1939, when there were no Germans in sight. The Jews were rejoicing over the occupation of eastern Poland by the Russians. To Polish Catholics, this was simply treason, analogous to the occasional warm receptions in western Poland of the Germans by some Volksdeutsche.
Now, it is undeniable that in the German-occupied portion of Poland where the situation of the Jews was worse than that of the Catholics, many Polish families hid Jews from the Nazi occupiers. It is a matter of record that Poles are listed at Yad Vashem numerically first amongst the righteous Gentiles for risking their lives and those of their families for sheltering Jews from the Nazis. So, it is fair to ask the question, "When did Jews use their favored position in Soviet occupied eastern Poland to shelter Polish Catholics from the NKVD?" This reviewer regrets to say that he cannot find any instances of such assistance.
Up to the day (June 22, 1941) when Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, Gross (Revolution from Abroad p. 194) estimates that 1.25 million people were transported into the Soviet Union from eastern Poland. The ghastly NKVD prisons in Poland were generally used as holding cells for Poles awaiting execution or prison train space for transportation to the gulags. When the Germans attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed or moved to the east 150,000 prisoners from these holding cells. In the Brygidki prison in Lwów, on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed almost all of the 13,000 inmates. (Revolution from Abroad, p. 179). This was recorded by Gross as a "massacre" rather than a pogrom.
After the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, they encouraged anti-Semitic acts by the Poles, including pogroms. The Germans had only the most minimal success. Polish Catholics were not inclined to participate in Nazi murders. Moreover, the Polish underground punished betrayal of Jews to the Nazis by death. In Fear, Gross eschews the careful data based arguments he gave in his earlier book Revolution from Abroad. What is substituted is the kind of postmodern sermonizing that appeals to Gross's anti-Polish, anti-Catholic choir.
FEAR:ANTI-SEMITISM IN "SWEDEN" AFTER AUSCHWITZ...YES.......2007-08-03
A little known fact is that Sweden, upon their four year invasion (1655-1658) and brutal occupation of Poland, had brought with them their cultural tendencies and indoctrinated them on the Poles. One doctrine that dominated the Swedish invasion, of Poland, was the SWEDES RAMPANT AND OBSSESIVE MISSION TO FOSTER/SPREAD "ANTI-SEMITISM." Going from the 17th century to the 20th, when boat loads of Jews, who were fortunate to escape the misery of war-ravaged europe,(unlike the Poles and countless Europeans who would continue to suffer horribly, "AFTER 'THEIR' HOLOCAUST,you know "THE OTHERS," under Stalin), headed to Sweden, the Swedish Government pushed these boats back, sending the Jewish holocaust survivors away. The Swedes did not want them either. The English did the same, and the rest is history. The Jews were basically thrown out of every country in Europe(WHY?!). Why did all the jews end up in Poland? Here's why: because, unlike "all" the other countries, Poland was not murdering robbing and deporting them. The Jewish word in Europe was: "Poland is welcoming the jews, we are not persecuted there 'Come to Poland!'" And the Jews came and lived in harmony for centuries. The sad truth is that, anti-semitism, for whatever reason is, sadly, in practically every country. The 64K question is: "WHY IS THERE SO MUCH ANTI-SEMITISM WHEREVER JEWS SETTLE???? Anyone who knows anything about WWII, knows that, if not for the Jewish holocaust, simultaneous with Polish-Catholic Holocaust, the Polish nation would be, as they should be, portrayed as the greatest sufferers/victims of world wars. Come on people, Poland is between Germay and Russia, Hitler and Stalin. What an unfair and vicious psychological flip Mr. gross does in his book to villify a 2 century tormented Poland,i.e., encouraging anti-Polish hate, instead of telling a true story, with some objectivity, where Poland could easily be seen as 'greatest victims, equal victims, vivtims!; fostering, overdue, Pro-Polish deserved sympathy). Mr. gross chose the path of HATE. It's easier. This gross book only stirs up the old cauldren of hate. This hate book by gross, gives every "bigot," just what their looking for: a fabricated reason to really hate; any reason will do.. One must read JAN KARSKI: A SECRET STATE. KARSKI wrote this during the war and is very objective, and tells the "real story." Gross tells, his version, of the story almost 60 years later. This book is filled with sensationalisms coated with bitterness and an awful hatred. Jan Karski "WAS THERE!" Stories closer to real history are fresh and remembered more acurately, as oppossed to hateful/hurtful embellished quasi-novels like Gross'. My Goodness, no nation suffered like Poland. Gross' book only reminds people to make sure to "continue to hate, hate and hate some more. This does no one any good, especially in our worlds present uncertain state. What really is sad is that the COMMUNIST AUTHORITIES WERE ABLE TO, AGAIN, BLAME POLAND FOR "THEIR DIRTY WORK." Those of you who have read this book, are suffering needlessly because of Mr gross' embellishments and "over-the-top" sensationalisms. Even the pogrom photos are said to be doctored photos from a pogrom by the Lituanian police beating jews in the street, of course, up in Lithuania. For peace between Jews and Non-jews(ALL SUFFERED UNDER GERMANS) and understanding, settle down and read Jan Karski: A Secret State. Mr. Karski, unlike mr. Gross, wrote to fill the world with better understanding, and to inform the world. Everyone, must get this undisputed fact through their heads!: NO MATTER WHAT "ALL THE OTHER NATIONS IN EUROPE DID(including the viscious/brutal Danish SS, the Norwegian S.S.; Vichy France(#2), and the #1 anti-semitic country: ROMANIA, with the Jewish butchering "IRON GUARD."(look into it, read michael Marrus Holocaust in history). THE "GERMANS, AND "ONLY" THE GERMANS DECIDED TO KILL EVERY JEW IN THIS WORLD, AND ACTUALLY HAD THE NATION PUT THEIR "HEART,AND SOUL" INTO TRYING TO ACHIEVE IT. The Germans, as we all know, murdered and burned 6,000,000 Jews., and 3,000,000 Polish-Catholics. May they "all" rest in peace. Write books and live to make the world better, not gross. Don't waste your time or money, on this book. I've discussed this book with Polish and Jewish friends. We all agreed that it served no purpose, but to upset all of us. Look for truth, and you'll feel happier: READ KARSKI.
Noble Effort; Should Be Read, and Understood, In Full.......2007-07-25
In reviewing Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz," one must consider two phenomena: the book itself, and exploitations of it.
The book "Fear" is excellent. The subject matter, anti-Semitism in Poland after the Holocaust, is of vital interest to any adult human with a conscience. The central portion of the book addresses the 1946 Kielce pogrom. Holocaust survivors were murdered, including being slowly stoned to death, on the basis of blood libel. This eruption boggles the mind; as part of understanding what one is as a human being, one wants to plumb this event. Thus, though aghast and sobbing, the reader can't help but continue to turn the pages until a conclusion is reached.
Gross' prose is elegant. His authorial presence is never intrusive, and yet the reader feels as if in the hands of a world-class expert with an encyclopedic command of even the most minuscule of pertinent historical facts. At times Gross' self-restraint weakens, and he makes a cutting comment, and those moments, rare as they are, merely enhance the reader's experience. You want to know that this powerful mind was driven to anguish by these facts, just as you are.
Gross struggles to be evenhanded. In fact, he is the author of previous books that depict Polish victimization under Nazi and Communist invasion ("Revolution from Abroad"; "Polish Society under German Occupation.") He opens "Fear" with a snapshot of the disaster that was WW II for Poland. In short, he wants us to know that human beings don't commit atrocities in a vacuum.
Though I greatly admired this book, there are some shortcomings.
Gross appears to state that he is the first to argue that Poles experience guilt over having taken over property vacated by Jewish Holocaust victims, and that this guilt exacerbated post-war Polish anti-Semitism. But Steinlauf said as much almost a decade previously, in 1997's "Bondage to the Dead," and Polish authors have said as much in less-read publications. Steinlauf also successfully harnessed Robert Jay Lifton's theories; Gross should have engaged this, and at least mentioned cultural reflections like the Czechoslovak film, "Shop on Main Street."
Gross should have at least mentioned Edna Bonacich's "Middleman Minority" theory. Thomas Sowell has recently written on the, to outsiders, inexplicable atrocities that have been inflicted on Middleman Minorities in places as distant from Poland as Southeast Asia.
The Kielce pogrom was sparked by blood libel. Blood libel is so absurd that readers may come to regard Poles as a lesser species. Gross himself, as utterly masterful as he is in his command of historical personages and events, is adrift when discussing folklore. He does not even cite, for example, Alan Dundes' basic work, though Gross' theory is similar to Dundes. Gross never uses the Freudian term "projective inversion," but, like Dundes, that is his understanding.
In fact, the Middleman Minority theory sheds some light on this item of ugly folklore, to a reader, unlike Gross, familiar with the study of folklore. Regard organ theft legends in the Third World today. Villagers insist that Americans are stealing children's organs for transplants. In 1994, June Weinstock, an Alaskan environmentalist, was beaten with sticks until thought dead by Maya Indians in Guatemala. A boy had wondered off; Guatemalans convinced themselves that the Gringo tourist had stolen his organs. This absurd legend is believed because it encapsulates the people's feeling of economic exploitation.
This understanding does not excuse anti-Semitism -- nothing does -- in fact, the very best Poles have always owned up to the anti-Semitism in their country, and given their lives to fight it. But unless a real attempt is made to understand why destructive folklore has currency, we can't help prevent atrocities.
The reception of "Fear" by the media, community leaders and readers here is disconnected from the book. Sadly, many readers have used this book, itself a courageous protest against hate, exactly as a carte blanche justifying their own hatred. While Gross struggles for fairness and conscience, too many exploiters of "Fear" struggle to make it say something it never says, i.e., "I have been telling you all along; those Polaks? They are animals."
Two misconceptions stand out. One is the insistence that a Polish national essence is responsible for the crime at Kielce. Gross himself attempts to fend off this kind of essentializing with his opening quote about the genocide in Rwanda. Events like these have happened before, far distant from Poland; they will happen again. We must develop a cross-cultural paradigm for understanding, one that is not hostage to the accumulation of chips in an ethnic grudge match.
The other misconception is the insistence that Gross alone has "forced" Poles from their "denial." Again, in this understanding, Poles are essentially incapable of conscience, and require a Jewish author to be pilloried for their crimes. This stereotype is all the more believable because many readers are unfamiliar with Poland, and don't speak Polish.
First, Warsaw-born Gross is as Polish as any Catholic. In any case, even if one rejects his identity on the racist grounds that a Jew can't also be a Pole, non-Jewish Poles, as well as Jewish ones, have been writing about Polish guilt for Polish crimes against Jews. Steinlauf's "Bondage to the Dead" offers a good summary of works by authors like Jan Blonski, Jerzy Ficowski, and Czeslaw Milosz. Many of these writings have not made a splash in the West in the way that Gross' have, but they have ignited self-examination in Poland. Gross quotes one of these works at length: Marcel Lozinski's 1988 film "Witnesses."
The publication of Jan Tomasz Gross' "Fear" is a victorious shedding of light on a very dark time. Its victory will be complete when readers can accept it for what it actually says, rather than what they want it to say, and exercise, for themselves, the very same courage, integrity and compassion that Gross therein exemplifies.
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.......2007-03-16
A good insight into the attitudes of indigenous populations in Europe in
regards to anti-semitism. It gives a good perspective as to why the Germans set up the death camps in the eastern part of Poland and why so few Jews who escaped the camps and ghettoes were able to last out the war.
Outstanding.......2007-03-12
people should understand that poland after thw war was very anti-semitic. The first revewer is completly ignoring the facts and the truth. The book is a wonderful analysis of the issue.
Amazon.com
Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, edited by Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, is probably the most comprehensive volume on Auschwitz in print. Essays by leading scholars from Europe, Israel, and the United States document the history of the camp, the technology and magnitude of the genocide that occurred there, profiles of the inmates and the Nazis who ran the camp (such as Joseph Mengele), the underground resistance that arose, and what the outside world knew about Auschwitz and when. It's not a book to read straight through because of the sheer volume of information (more than 600 pages of text) and the horror of its contents. But it's the best resource for answering a wide variety of questions about the camp, especially those raised by the many excellent memoirs by the survivors. --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews:
ANATOMY OF THE AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP.......2005-10-31
Excellent and detailed account of all aspects of the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex and its subcamps. The illustrations and pictures of the installations and camp add a new insight into the history and functioning of the camp and gives a different perspective on the technology and mindset that led to the mass murder and annihilation that took place there. As reader of holocaust literature for nearly 35 years, I consider this to be a definitive work on this subject.
Expectations can ignore reality.......2004-09-26
Michael Ryan calls the book "cold". I have a large library of books on the Holocaust that look at through many eyes. Often the books by survivors are filled with emotion and facts as seen from a narrow view. A scientific study gives us the facts in as much detail as possible ON THE POINTS STUDIED. Read Hoess's autobiography for possibly the best understanding of the minds of many of the participants.
To Mr. Frantzman I would suggest that this book is 600 pages long, but certainly not ALL INCLUSIVE. I doubt that anyone could possibly write a single book (or a set within a rational time) that can deal "fairly" with every facit of the camp. My first book was the seminal "The Destruction of European Jewery" by Raul Hilberg who a few years ago I had a chance to meet and discuss issues. He said that it would take a library of books (which I have) to cover all the aspects of the Holocaust, and still we would only know ABOUT it. And he was right. I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED IN DETAIL--BUT DON'T TRULY UNDERSTAND HOW A NATION COULD DO SUCH A THING. Aways there are the "insane"--but a NATION? But what about Pol Pot, Africa, etc. Even many of those who survived (and I have known a number) cannot stretch their minds to understand. And some of my friends were in the first batch of American soldiers to enter a camp, and to their deaths they could still FEEL (and have nightmares about)it--but not understand how it could happen.
cold autopsy.......2003-08-01
I purchased this book along with BELZEC, SOBIBOR, TREBLINKA: The operation Reinhard Death Camps.
I find it a cold study of what took place here. It does not give us any feeling about the people who operated this horrible place.
Other than a cold statistical study of the SS guards there is nothing. You don't get the feel of Hoess, Mengele, or Marie Mandel, or Irma Grese that the Reinhard book gives us of Globocnick, Stangle, and their vile ilk. Just as it does not give any real feeling for the millions of innocencts who were slaughtered here.
It is a very informative work, but a cold autopsy of a hellish place.
good, not entirely correct.......2003-05-20
I liked this book. A compilation of many people this details every aspect of the famous death camp. From the design of the ovens to the lives of the women. Yet I think it is missing crucial information. It claims only 1.5 million died at the camp, I think this figure has been dispuited and is low. It also does not detail the resistance as I've understood it. Apparently in 1944 the Sonderkommando rebelled, leaving 70 S.S dead and wounded. In the chapter on resistance the author only says 3 S.S were killed. The reality is that Dr. Miklos confirms the data of 70 dead in his book 'Auschwitz: a Doctors eyewtiness account'. Now the reality is that the rebellion destroyed two cremetoria and that Miklos witnessed these events. I dont think the chapter on resistance focus's on this profoundly heroic act enough. The book is very detailed and examines all aspects of camp life. But I felt that it did not detail the crimes of the Nazi Doctors enough. I felt it glossed over the torture perpetrated on the guinea pigs(humans), Miklos glosses over it too but the reality is other accounts detail the horrors of the experiments. It also glosses over the treatment of women. It does not mention the rape of women(or men). But we know from accounts that during 'selections' many Jewish women were subjected to rape and barbarism. SO why does the book cover this up? I think these issues should have been addressed. But nevertheless this is a great book about the machinery of murder. It will make you wonder how it was all possible.
A REVISIONIST'S NIGTHMARE.......2002-02-19
This book contains several studies by different scholars, about the workings of the Auschwitz killing machine. Very well researched, it addresses different moral, legal, sociological and psychological issues about the people that worked (S.S. and Sonderkommando) and those who died in the camp. It also provides valuable insigths and enough documented information about Auschwitz's infrastructure, that clearly eliminates any possibility to deny the reality of this tragedy.
If you are a historian or a scholar of the Holocaust or the S.S, you should have this book in your library. If you are a Holocaust denier, you must read this book, with an open mind. Then, you will be able to perhaps move on, to deny Pol Pot's killing fields...
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book!.......2007-10-08
This book exceeded my expectations. The way the author goes back and forth between survivors' accounts and factual information about Mengele was a great way to keep the book interesting. I was intrigued from beginning to end. A lot of books that just rehash the past can be boring but this book was truely great. I learned a lot of factual information but also was deeply drawn to the survivors' stories. Highly recommended!
confusing the reader.......2007-07-07
This is a very good book with factual accounts from some of the youngest twins. What I found confusing is the way the author wrote the book. There seems to be some jumping around, comparisons of sorts. This book thoroughly explains how the surviving twins got together and met with the author, as well as the founding of their organization. This book does not go into great detail as to what specific types of horrific experiments were done, as most of the survivors able to tell their stories were very young at the time, and/or they have repressed their memories of the horror. It does give second-hand accounts of the 'goings-on' of Mengele by those that survived.
Testament to suvivors of horror.......2007-04-20
This harrowing book traces both the life of 'the angel of death', the psycopathic monster, Dr Josef Mengele, and his victims who survived.
Mengele carried out a range of horrific experiments on a range of people, mainly twins. particularly Jewish and Gipsey children, and various others.
As Mengele's life is described, so is the life of the survivors, the horrors that they experienced at Auschwitz and how they lived in the decades afterwards.
"Most of the twins began their descent into Auschwitz by witnessing their entire families being led away from them to be killed. In their special barracks, located just yards away from the crematoriums, they observed the Nazis' extermination of Jews at close range. Twins as young as five and six years of age endured torture, daily blood tests and starvation diets, as well as facing exposure to epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases that were rampant because of unsanitary conditions. Worst of all, of course, were the Mengele's barbaric pseudoscientific experiments. But as horrific as their lives were the twins enjoyed a special privileged status, for they were regarded as "Mengele's children". And as such they were spared the random selections and march to the gas chambers that threatened every other Auschwitz inmate'.
The testimony of a handful of survivors illustrates the horror of Mengele and Auschwitz, and the scars of the experiences suffered by his victims, and how they experienced them through their lives.
In the testimony of Moshe Offer, who was twelve years old at the time: 'When they opened the doors to our cattle cars, there were lots of dead children. During the trip, some mothers couldn't bare to hear the sound of their hungry babies-and so they killed them. I remember two blond, very beautiful children in my car, whose mother had choked them to death because she could not stand to watch them suffer'.
Eva Mozes, who was nine years old at the time, recounts how, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she and her twin sister were packed into filthy, rat infested barracks, together with hundreds of other little girls.
She remembers seeing three dead children on the ground. Later they would always be finding dead children on the floor of the latrines.
From their barracks they could see huge, smoking chimneys rising high above the camp. There were glowing flames rising above them. ' " Why are they burning so late in the evening?" I asked the other children. "The Germans are burning people they answered".
Twins Hedvah and Leah Stern. who were thirteen years old at the time, recount how Mengele tried to change the colour of their eyes:' One day we were given eye drops. Afterwards, we could not see for several days. We though the Nazis had made us blind.
We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused.
We were not very developed. The Nazis made us remove our clothes and they took photographs of us.
The SS guards would point to us and laugh. We stood naked in front of these young Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed."
The first few chapters of the book deal with Mengele's role in Auschwitz itself, and the rest of the book relates Eichmann's experience in hiding in South America, and the way the surviving twins built up lives and families for themselves, most of them in Israel, while the nightmare of Auschwitz would scar and effect them forever.Most of the twins longed to emigrate to the Land of Israel, then the British Colony of Palestine.
They soon found that the Communist rulers of their former homes in lands like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, were hostile to the Jewish people too, and pesecuted those who wanted to go to Israel and those who wanted to hold onto their Jewish faith, as 'Zionists'. Thus developed that form of Leftist anti-Semitism known as anti-Zionism, which was incubated by the Soviet Union, and is endemic among the international left today.
The rest of the book deals with how Mengele dwindled in exile into a neurotic and bitter non-being. The surivors describe their lives in Israel and elsewhere, after the war, their often fearful behaviour, their nightmares and their treatment, and also how they built up new lives and families, which live on in the Jewish homeland.
Mengele died after suffering a stroke and drowning in 1979, in Brazil.
Historical correction.......2007-01-06
Dr.Mengele's actual history has been full of inaccuracies and speculations. This book attempts to clarify many issues. It is a must reading for anybody doing reseach about the holocaust.
Grab this little gem and embrace it.......2006-10-01
What these 2 authors have done is brilliant, elegant and spellbinding. They have woven together a historical timeline based on best available sources and featuring first-hand testimony from Dr. Mengele's twins, to shed light on Mengele's medical "experiments" -- some of the deepest sociopathy ever known to mankind -- as well as the many profiles in courage spawned by the tragic events covered. The book comes across as a labor of love, in which the authors relate as 2 civil human beings to another, engaging the best in the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Rarely do I view a nonfiction work, however worthwhile, as one that I cannot put down, but this book is an exception. Scholars of the WWII/Holocaust era cannot consider that their library or education are complete without this work.
The overall impressions I have, from the many and tragically ironic story lines in this volume, leave me disturbed. This strikes me as not just a case of one individual's sociopathy translating to the ruin of countless lives and inflicting of infinite suffering. It is also a case of too many forces for good proving indecisive, apathetic and quarrelsome, so that justice, in the end, was not fully served, nor was the correct message transmitted to future generations. In far too many respects, the victims were left to find their own solace. This grossly compounds the damage, both to them and to any of us who are trying hard to find civility in the societies in which we live.
Amazon.com
Because Auschwitz was among the most brutal of the concentration camps, ruled by capricious, pure force and not by any discernable political or social structure, the intellectual there "was alone with his intellect ... and there was no social reality that could support and confirm it." In other words, there was no place for the intellect to act, outside of the confines of a person's own skull. Jean Amery's At The Mind's Limits is a focused meditation on the position of the intellectual placed in "a borderline situation, where he has to confirm the reality and effectiveness of his intellect, or to declare its impotence: in Auschwitz." In the camp, Amery writes, "The intellect very abruptly lost its basic quality: its transcendence." Considering this loss, Amery describes his own experience of torture, his reactions of resentment, anger, and bitterness, his loss of any vital sense of metaphysical questions, and his search for some way to maintain moral character and Jewish identity in the absence of such consciousness. --Michael Joseph Gross
Customer Reviews:
Disappointing.......2006-10-18
Amery did not only pick up a new French-sounding name, but (although this book was originally written in German) apparently also the circumlocutionary style of the French. If you like a book full of idle verbiage, with arguments beginning nowhere and leading nowhere, and references to passé writers such as Sartre, then this book is for you.
But it's not merely the style that I disliked. All essays (rants, more like) gravitate around Amery's pathological hate for all Germans, past and present. All Germans, except for some four individuals he mentions by name, are inherently bad. Nazis all of them, and torture is the essence of their being. Amery is dissatisfied with the world, because after the war, Germany was not permanently turned into a potato patch as the Morgenthau plan had envisaged it. A typical only child, Amery seems to think that the world should turn around his personal sufferings and frustrations. He hardly ever speaks of his fellow prisoners, and if he does, he belittles them because they are not interested in, let alone able to quote Liliencron or other poets Any Intellectual Should Know. Finally, as could be expected, the post-war generation of Germans is bad, because they do not want to permanently crawl in the dust before Amery.
I regret having spent money on this book.
Jean Amery, the thinker, makes one think.......2006-03-13
Of all the Holocaust books, this book stands above the rest, with the content focused not on the gory details of Nazi atrocities (which are by themselves worth reading if you want to validate the experiences of those who suffered), but rather on the psychological implications of being a victim. Only books by Primo Levi contain this degree of depth of thought and introspection.
An extraordinary meditation on catastrophe........2005-10-24
Prior to reading Amery's book, I thought of myself as thoroughly read in what one French scholar has called "the writing of the disaster," but Amery's may be among the half dozen essential texts in the now overwhelming body of Holocaust literature. A profound meditation on language, on mind, and on disaster in the 20th century.
One to return to.......2005-08-11
Ever since writing a term paper on Amery's "At the Mind's Limits", I have continuously come back to this work. There is a lifetime's worth of contemplation to survey here, not that this is an autobiography or even a complete memoir, but the years of his life on which he writes and the experiences dissected provoke a lifetime's worth of questions, mostly unanswered.
I think of this work as a distinct and great existential accomplishment. It provokes the reader to empathize while simultaneously making him question or even feel guilty for such empathy. How can an intellect, in the modern west at least, empathize with one who has experienced dehumanization to such an unimaginable degree? The short answer is that to try to do so is impossible and even probably detestable, morally speaking.
But isn't the motivation of Amery's expression the prevention of such dehumanization in future? And isn't such prevention dependent on empathetic attempts at least (among other things)?
These are unanswerable contradictions for the reader. But the introspective applications make this a necessary book to read over and over again.
haunting human analysis..........2002-11-18
This man, who lived caught between paralyzing fear and paralyzing anger, refuses to countenance the immoral world he found so horribly crude, ignorant and inadequate. I know of no more unrelenting self-criticism or self-asceticism than portrayed here in this work.
Every "outsider" will recognize immediately that the author talks to him/her. No matter by what standard one is taken as an outsider, here is a priceless analysis of your experience, writ humbly, clearly and painfully.
Every "moralist" will recognize immediately the accusations the authors aims in your direction with too-precise accuracy that will not allow you to wriggle free of the dread implications.
Every "religionist" will recognize the futility of responding in comforting platitude to the undeniable evidence of evil writ hugely in this thin volume.
I know of few intellectuals who will receive the meaning of this work with welcome. To almost all others, it will be set aside with well-explained rationalizations...
But for the reader who knows what "outside" means, what "cataclysm" means, and what "torment" of any stripe whatsoever means, then here you will find a comrade. Here you will find words of encouragement to struggle on...your lot is not as bad as it could be, after all...for here we find our comrade who has endured to the very limits of the mind. And survives, with bright intellect intact and sharp. Uncomfortably so.
A note on the "Auswitz" in the title--Don't allow this word to dissuade you from the universal human experience that is the focus of this work. Any and every human being can take an enhanced image of life and world from this resource.
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From Athens to Auschwitz: The Uses of History
Christian Meier
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Early Civilization
| Ancient
| History
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Reference
| Historical Study
| History
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Social History
| Historical Study
| History
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General
| World
| History
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General
| Greece
| Europe
| History
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ASIN: 0674016920 |
Book Description
What does history mean today? What is its relevance to the modern world? In contemplating fundamental questions about history and the Western legacy, the noted classical historian Christian Meier offers a new interpretation on how we view the world.
Meier sees an "absence" of history in contemporary Europe and throughout the West--an absence he attributes to the way modern historians have written about history and, more important, to the dramatic transformations of the twentieth century. He argues for the central legacy of Western civilization. He tackles the difficulty of reconciling a historical perspective with our era of extreme acceleration, when experience is shaped less by inheritance and legacy than by the novelty of changes wrought by science and globalization. Finally, Meier contemplates the enormity of the Holocaust, which he sees as a test of "understanding" history. If it is part of the whole arc of the Western legacy, how do we fit it with the rest?
This engaging and thought-provoking meditation challenges us to rethink the role of history in Western culture and a changing world.
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