labfs39 reads nonfiction (2013)

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labfs39 reads nonfiction (2013)

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1labfs39
feb 1, 2013, 12:15 am



1. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France by Caroline Moorehead

Wow, an extraordinary story indeed! During the German occupation of France, the French police rounded up women from all over the country who were believed to be involved with the Resistance. The women included a dentist, a midwife, chemists, office workers, innkeepers, cafe owners, farm wives, school girls, and an opera singer. They were interred together in the fort at Romainville, where they grew to know and protect one another. In January 1943, these 240 women were sent together on a train to Auschwitz/Birkenau, where their friendship and solidarity helped them survive. All but one were later transferred to Ravensbruck. An amazing 49 were liberated and lived to return home.

The book begins with a look at how French resistance to the German occupation began and how women were involved from the very beginning. Because of their work in offices, many women were able to write, print, and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets. French women were able to hide resisters in their cafes, inns, and homes, as well as escort them across the demarcation line. Chemists made materials for bombs, others were able to make or procure medicines. Some even transported arms and participated in sabotage. And neither the French police nor the Gestapo suspected women of taking these sorts of risks, so for a while they operated in the open without being suspected.

But a meticulous and patient French policeman named Fernand David began a system of surveillance in the Paris region where every suspected member of the resistance, especially communists, were followed and notes were taken on their appearance, movements, and those of everyone with whom they spoke. Although it was a slow process, the day came when he had dossiers on everyone as well as their relationships. It began with the Phase Pican, in which 19 people were arrested, nine of them women. Later sweeps would bring in a hundred suspects at a time, all linked through networks. Whereas the men were tortured, executed, or held as hostages to be executed in retaliation for a German death (at rates as high as 100 Frenchmen for one German), the women were not, as a rule. tortured or executed, but imprisoned at Romainville.

It is while imprisoned that most of the women met for the first time, although a few already knew each other through their networks. Here they bonded and began to think of group survival as more important than individual survival. It was this group unity and friendship that sustained them in the camps. Their experiences were horrible, and few survived, but more would have died if it weren't for their group mentality. When the survivors returned, they spoke of missing the camaraderie that had sustained them for so long. Especially since the French population was not keen to listen to their stories. Most French, encouraged by De Gaulle, were ready to move on, rebuild, and to think of the French Resistance as a national movement that was heroic and liberated a proud country. These sad, sick, and bedraggled women were not what the country wanted for symbols of the Resistance, and the women's attempts to confront their betrayers, the collaborators, and those who joined the Resistance in the final hour, were thwarted. No one wanted to dwell on the collaboration, they wanted to look to the future, something many of the survivors found depressingly hard to do.

In addition to extensive research, the author interviewed six of the survivors and spoke with the families of many more, often being allowed to read diaries, letters, and see photographs. She tracked down the names, fates, and characteristics of all but a couple of the women. Although the book focuses more heavily on a few women, it is a collective narrative. I learned a great deal about the beginnings of the Resistance and the role women played. I was stunned by many of the things I learned in the book. But a couple of things stand out. First, the role French policeman played in the capture, torture, and execution of their own countrymen. I hadn't realized how large a role they played in collaboration with the Gestapo and other Nazi organizations. Second, I had been ignorant of this unique group of 230 women, the only ones to be deported to the camps from France. Finally, it's astonishing how the ties of friendship between these women allowed them to fight and survive at higher rates longer than other demographics in the camps. This camaraderie assisted by the strong ideology of the communists in the group is unique among my reading, at least, and is astonishingly inspiring.

I highly recommend this book.

2labfs39
feb 1, 2013, 12:16 am

Not sure if this counts. It is a memoir, but slightly fictionalized to fit the form.



4. Barefoot Gen: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima, v. 1 by Keiji Nakazawa

In his fictionalized memoir, artist Keiji Nakazawa tells the story of his childhood during WWII and his survival of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In this first volume of ten, Nakazawa depicts the hardships of life in Japan during the war with mandatory homeland defense training, near starvation, and constant bombing. Gen's father is outspoken about his anti-war views and he serves time in jail, leaving his family to fend for themselves. Gen's mother is pregnant, and falls ill due to malnutrition and overwork. Gen, his younger brother, and older sister live at home and are treated abominably by the neighbors for being related to a anti-war traitor. Gen and his brother retaliate violently, but it often backfires and brings down more trouble. One of Gen's older brothers joins the Naval Air Corps to be a kamikaze pilot and bring honor to the family, much against his family's wishes. The other, a third grader, is evacuated with his school class to the countryside where he works in the fields in harsh conditions. When Gen's father returns home, the family rejoices, but is also subject to his casual violence as he tries to beat his values into his children.

The fate of Gen's family when the bomb falls on August 6, 1945 is harrowing and true to life, with the exception that in the book Gen returns home in time to witness the events that Nakazawa actually learns later that day from his mother. Although the author describes these events in the introduction, and thus it's not really a spoiler, I am going to avoid relating what happens as the impact of reading Nakazawa words cannot be replicated.

After finishing the book, I had very mixed feelings. The memoir itself is exceptional, if difficult to read, but I had a hard time with the stylized grimacing and sweating faces of the characters. I am not familiar with manga and found the art off-putting. I also found the casual brutality depicted in the book, both within Gen's family and within the larger community, to be very disturbing, especially the violence to and by children. (Although, of course, this violence is nothing compared to the horror of the atomic bombing.) In his introduction, Art Spiegelman addresses both of these issues, and I found his explanations helpful, if not palliative. In short, according to Spiegelman, both violence and the stylized faces are typical of manga of the time and would not be seen as out of place to a Japanese audience. Nor would the length of the entire Barefoot Gen series, which runs to almost 2000 pages. Although I am glad that I read the first volume, I am going to cancel my interlibrary loan of the next two volumes, at least for now. For me, it's a story best digested in small chunks.

3labfs39
aug 31, 2013, 7:33 pm



54. The War within these Walls by Aline Sax, illustrations by Caryl Strzelecki, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Powerful language combined with stark yet beautiful drawings make this short novel arresting. Although marketed as a young adult novel in the US, I found nothing juvenile about the treatment or the language.

Misha and his family are Polish Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto by the Germans during the Holocaust. As more and more people are forced into the ghetto, the threat of starvation rises. Misha begins crossing to the Aryan side of the wall via the sewers to find food for his family. The knowledge of the underground passages serves him well when he joins a group of Jewish fighters determined to make the Germans pay when they come to liquidate the ghetto.

Similar to a graphic novel, the drawings are integral to the storytelling. Particularly moving was the juxtaposition of black text on white pages with the occasional black page with white text. Although the story of the Warsaw Uprising is well-known, this telling is worth reading for its visual and emotional impact.

4labfs39
Redigerat: aug 31, 2013, 7:37 pm



A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous, translated from the German by Philip Boehm

The author of this remarkable diary was a journalist who wrote with a dispassionate clarity about her life in Berlin during the eight weeks following the collapse of the German army and the occupation by the Russians. The incredible tension, followed by tedium; the horror that gives way to a numbed acceptance; the small details that made life both bearable and unbearable: it's all here in a fascinating first hand account. I got the impression that the author, being a journalist, was definitely writing for an audience, but the writing is so stark and honest at times, that I don't doubt its veracity. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the time period.

5labfs39
aug 31, 2013, 7:41 pm

These I read, but didn't review:

23. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (2.5*) - 235 p.

26. Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth (3*) - 321 p.

35. The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons by Lena Constante, translated from the Romanian by Franklin Philip (3*) - 257 p.

41. The secret Holocaust diaries : the untold story of Nonna Bannister by Nonna Bannister (3.5*) - 298

42. Treblinka by Jean-François Steiner (3.5*) - 415 p.

46. Hostage to War by Tatjana Wassiljewa, translated from the Russian by Anna Tenter (3.5*) - 188 p.

6labfs39
Redigerat: sep 25, 2013, 7:27 pm



61. The Seamstress by Sara Tuvel Bernstein

Sara Tuvel was a survivor. Not only did she strike out on her own at age thirteen, but she survived prison, forced labor, and the notorious Ravensbruck concentration camp. In addition, her force of character and resourcefulness helped other young women survive as well.

Seren was born into a large family comprised of her father's seven children from a previous marriage as well as her four siblings. Although her father was strict, she had a happy and adventurous childhood. The only shadow was the antisemitism she experience at school. Despite her father's demand that girls remain at home, Seren accepted a scholarship to school in Bucharest and moved there on her own. After suffering more antisemitism, she leaves school, and without telling her parents, rents a room and apprentices herself to a dressmaker. This self-sufficiency and independence may have frustrated her family, but proved to be invaluable in the coming years.

As Nazi persecution increases, Seren and her family are separated by new borders between Romania and Hungary, by family members' forced relocation into ghettos, and by imprisonment. Seren not only fends for herself, but frequently takes care of her mother and sisters as well. Despite imprisonment, loss, forced labor, and incredible journeys by foot or rail, Seren remains determined to see things through and to protect others as best she can. Her strength and spirit are quite remarkable.

Having read a fair number of Holocaust memoirs, several things in The Seamstress stand out for me. It is one of only a handful of Romanian survivor stories that I have read, and she is also one of the few Jewish survivors of Ravensbruck who have shared their stories. Her testimony is invaluable. The book was written by Louise Loots Thornton based on hours of interviews and tapes that Seren (Sara) made and edited by Seren's daughter Marlene after her mother's death. Ms. Thornton says that she tried to imitate Seren's style of speaking which was unemotional and direct. As a result, the book is a bit flat in tone and is lacking the interpretation of events that might occur with an author is writing their own story. Nowhere is there commentary on what happened, rather simply the facts of what did happen. As a result, any philosophical or moral reflecting is left up to the reader.

7labfs39
okt 6, 2013, 6:53 pm



65. The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire by Khassan Baiev, with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff

One of my favorite reads of the year so far, I would highly recommend this memoir to anyone even remotely interested in Chechnya or emergency medicine.

Khassan Baiev grew up in a small town southwest of Grozny, Chechnya. His family was typically traditional, and they spent every summer up in the mountains with their father's tiep or clan, working the land and listening to the stories of the elders. Sports, especially wrestling and hand to hand sports like judo, are extremely popular in Chechnya and Khassan, who had been born rather small and sickly, trained relentlessly until he was winning national competitions. Although he enjoyed competing, he did not want to be a coach, and decided to study medicine in Russia. He specialized in maxillofacial surgery and became a plastic surgeon. He was earning good money in Russia when the war broke out, but he returned home determined to help his people.

Fiercely independent, Chechnya has been governed by Russia in an uneasy relationship for centuries. In 1944 Stalin deported the majority of the Chechen people, including Baiev's parents, to remote regions of Kazakhstan and Siberia. They were only rehabilitated and allowed home fifteen years later, after Stalin's death. When the Berlin wall came down in 1990 and the Soviet Republics began declaring independence, Chechnya did too, seeing the possibility of an independent state in President Yeltsin's initial hands off approach. Unfortunately, Chechen President Dudayev was a poor leader and a terrible politician. In 1994, Russia entered Chechnya to establish order and preserve the integrity of the Russian nation. For two years guerrilla warfare ground away at Russian forces, and the Federal soldiers relentlessly bombed Grozny and other areas, killing up to a 100,000 civilians and displacing a half million. Due to a lack of Russian public support for the war and the stalemate on the ground, a ceasefire was declared in 1996 and a peace treaty was signed a year later. Two years later, a force calling itself the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade and comprised of both Chechens and Islamic radicals from outside invaded Dagestan, purportedly to help liberate the area from Russian control. Russia invaded Chechnya in retalitation, and set siege to Grozny. By the following May, the war was over and Chechnya was firmly back in the Russian orbit.

Throughout these wars, Khassan continuously risked his life in order to provide emergency medical care. Often he was the only surgeon in a very large area, and he ran a trauma hospital with a skeleton crew of nurses until it was bombed out and then operated in the basement of his house, which was bombed, rebuilt, and bombed again. Despite threats, Khassan steadfastly operated on Chechens and Russians alike, citing the Hippocratic Oath. At one point he was arrested by the Russians and held in a pit, but he refused to stop working, treating anyone who needed his help. Finally, during the second war, a price was put on his head by the Russians while one of the Chechen factions wanted him dead for operating on Russians. Human rights workers helped Khassan get asylum in the United States, where he was subsequently joined by his family.

Khassan's story is amazing on several fronts. Obviously his actions during the war were heroic, and his work then and now (he spends six months of the year working in Chechnya, operating on children hurt in the wars) is incredible. Yet equally interesting was the story of his childhood, a childhood straight from the pages of a Tolstoy novel of the Caucasus. For example, when his sister is abducted by bride snatchers, Khassan, as oldest son, is sent to steal her back. Yet, despite this traditional upbringing, Khassan is forthright about his struggles with debilitating depression and post traumatic stress. He acknowledges that talking about mental illness, as well as about his wife and family, is not considered acceptable in Chechen society, but he feels it is important to break down these barriers in the hope that others will seek the help they need to recover.

Highly recommended.

8labfs39
nov 3, 2013, 5:07 pm



69. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman

I loved everything about this book: the story of Lia Lee, the description of the medical dilemma facing the doctors, the theorizing about cultural clashes, the history of the Hmong. Anne Fadiman writes clearly and compellingly about a complex case, and it reads like fiction. I was fascinated by the glimpses of Hmong life both in Laos and in the US, of the Hmong language, and of Hmong music and how it can imitate speech. But most importantly, the book is well researched and balanced, showing how both doctors and parents were trying to do their best by the child.

As the author says, to tell a Hmong story, you need to go back to one of the many beginnings. I'll start with the war the CIA fomented and funded in Laos against the communists. I wasn't aware that the soldiers in this "quiet war" were Hmong, and that when the CIA tired of the game and pulled out, they left behind tens of thousands of targeted Hmong. The Lees were one of the families that emigrated to the US after a harrowing flight, ending up in Merced, California.

Lia was their youngest child, and particularly beloved, in part perhaps because she was the youngest and they had lost some of their older children to starvation and other horrors of war. But Lia was also loved because she was special. She was subjected to qaug dab peg, the spirit catches you and you fall down, or what Western doctors call epilepsy. This condition marked Lia, perhaps even destined her to become a shaman to her people. When her seizures were bad, Lia's parents took her to the clinic to receive medicine to help her in the moment, but not to cure her.

Lia's doctors, on the other hand, saw the epilepsy as a serious disease needing a drastic cure. Complicated schedules of stronger and stronger medicines were devised, spinal fluid was analyzed, veins were cut when IV's could no longer be inserted in the normal fashion. As her treatment became more complex and invasive, Lia's parents became more and more resistant. Often being without a translator, doctors and parents talked at each other with no comprehension on either side of the cultural barrier. And in the meantime, Lia gets worse.

The author does a wonderful job of portraying the doctors as caring, intelligent, dedicated people frazzled by overwork and what they see as noncompliance; and the Lees as caring, devoted parents doing their best to find a compromise between this confusing world and the known world they left behind. Since the book was published fifteen years ago, cultural differences are more acknowledged now, I think, even if the bridges between cultures are still far and few between. For this reason, the book is as relevant today as when it was written. Highly recommended.

9labfs39
nov 12, 2013, 12:36 am



71. The Road by Vasily Grossman, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olga Mukovnikova

Vasily Grossman has become one of my favorite authors, thanks both to his novels and nonfiction writings. He was a journalist, born in Ukraine, and became renowned during WWII for his eyewitness reporting, including an in-the-trenches account of the fall of Stalingrad. He also wrote one of the first accounts of a Nazi death camp when the Soviet army reached Treblinka. The Road is a collection of stories, essays, and nonfiction pieces, including the piece on Treblinka, and depicts the different stages in his writings as he went from a patriotic Red Army journalist to a persecuted author disillusioned with Stalinsim. This NYRB publication is also valuable for the commentary by editor Robert Chandler.

The first section of the book is a collection of three short stories that Grossman wrote in the 1930s. In them, you get a sense of how Grossman felt pulled in different directions: he owed his education and success as a writer to the Soviet government, but his family had felt the effects of the Terror, and being Ukrainian he had an idea of the horrific scale and effect of the 1932-33 famine there, a direct result of Stalin's policies. His stories balance social realism, the State sponsored literary style, with moral dilemmas that suggest a different point of view. For instance, "In the Town of Berdichev" a young commissar is forced to choose between her newborn baby and her comrades in the Red Army. One of the themes that is to return again and again in Grossman's stories is that of maternal love.

The second section contains two short stories and two essays from the 1940s. The first story is very Soviet in tone and is based on accounts from Russians who lived in villages occupied by the Germans. The second story is more personal. Grossman's mother had been murdered in one of the first Einsatzgruppen actions in the Ukraine in 1941, and the short story "The Old Teacher" is not only a personal reaction to his mother's death, but one of the first works of fiction published about the Holocaust. In it, an old, revered teacher tries to deal with the change in attitude of some of the villagers when the Germans move in and with the foreknowledge of his fate at the hands of the Nazis. We not only sense Grossman trying to imagine the thoughts of the Jews in situations like his mother's, but also his yearning for the love between parent and child.

The essay entitled "The Hell of Treblinka" is an incredible piece of journalism. Grossman was there with the Soviet army and interviewed as many people as he could in a short amount of time: survivors, locals, and former guards in detention. Although he got some of his numbers wrong by extrapolating based on local accounts, he accurately depicts the workings of a death camp and captures the psyche of both captives and captors to explain how it happened. It was instantly translated into other languages and was a powerful document revealing the extent of the Nazi horror to the rest of the world.

The third part of the book contains six stories from the mid to late 1950s. These stories are more daring, treading more closely the line between what was acceptable and what would get him arrested. During this time, Grossman was writing and trying to publish his novel Life and Fate, considered his masterpiece. In 1961, the KGB confiscated the manuscript and everything related to it, even the typewriter ribbon. Fortunately, Grossman had taken precautions and had hidden copies with friends, but he never recovered from the "arrest" of his book, as he called it. He was extremely fortunate not to have been arrested along with it. According to Chandler, only one other author had his book confiscated and remained free; only one other book was considered as dangerous—The Gulag Archipelago. The stories from this time deal with subjects like loved ones being taken in the night, their fates unknown; a young girl adopted by Yezhov, head of the NKVD during the Great Terror, and her devotion to him even after he is executed and she is sent away (based on a true story); the reception people released from the Gulag received when they returned home; the horror of war seen through the eyes of a mule; and how people who compromised with the regime would be blackmailed into becoming accomplices.

The next section of the book includes an excerpt from Life and Fate known as "The Last Letter" and is thought to be the letter Grossman wished his mother had been able to write him before her death. It is heartbreaking, as are the two letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death and kept with him the rest of his life. One written in 1950 and the other on the twentieth anniversary of her death, the letters show the love, anguish, and guilt that is reflected so often in his fiction.

In 1961, Grossman's health declined, and he died of lung cancer in 1964. "Eternal Rest", the last essay in the collection, is about death and the struggles people had to undergo to be buried where they wished. Although it is believed to have been written in 1956, shortly after the death of his father, it was to presage the difficulty his widow had in having him buried and the controversy over whether that was where he wished to be interred.

Overall, I find Grossman's writing to be highly personal, whether he is writing about the war, the Holocaust, or fictional characters. His stories reflect the changes he underwent as a result of all that he had witnessed and experienced. If it were not so dramatic, I would say that his soul is reflected in his writing, both tarnished and sublime. He obviously felt a great deal, and even when constrained in how he could say it, he managed to convey his feelings and ideas. I admire him a great deal.

10labfs39
nov 12, 2013, 11:02 pm



73. I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady Szwajger, translated from the Polish by Tasja Darowska and Danusia Stok

The whole of my past is like a film tightly rolled up and hidden in a drawer in the dimness of my memory. Only if you happen to touch this roll, the whole film unwinds and shows individual frames. Some of the images are faded, some are wiped out. But they are still there. Sometimes it seems to me that it is all still happening, that we are still living in that time. That is why I have not been able to live as others do. Like those who went out into the wide world and started everything from the very beginning. They know how to enjoy a car, a flat, the comforts of everyday life. Or even to enjoy life itself. It doesn't matter, certainly not now. What is important to my story is what happened then. What a normal day was like.

The everyday life of a courier girl.


Adina was twenty-two years old, recently married, and studying to be a doctor when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. During the three week siege of Warsaw, Adina begins her first phase of war work by volunteering at a first aid outpost. After the Soviet invasion and the capitulation of Warsaw, Adina escapes to Lvov, naively thinking to resume her medical studies. By the end of the year, ghettos are being formed and warned that she is on a list of those to be deported to the Gulags, Adina narrowly escapes back to Warsaw. Imprisoned in the ghetto, Adina continues to volunteer, now at a hospital for Jewish children. Desperately ill and starving children are brought to the hospital where tuberculosis and typhus wreck havoc. With few medicines and less food, there is little that the medical staff can do. Officially the daily food ration is 184 calories, but a daily dose of spirits gives the doctors just enough calories to stay on their feet. Then the deportations to Treblinka begin.

Adina manages to survive, although the horrors of the hospital and the actions she was forced to take will haunt her for the rest of her life. She escapes the ghetto with false labor papers and begins the second phase of her war work, as a courier for one of the resistance groups, the ZOB. She arranges hiding places, distributes cash, provides medical care, arranges false documents, all at great risk to her life. During the Ghetto Uprising, Adina has to watch and listen as the ghetto burns and fighters are shot, yet remain calm and inconspicuous as she runs her errands. Then comes the Warsaw Uprising, in which over 150,000 civilians will be killed. Once again, Adina will escape death, but not her memories. Finally, at the age of 71, Adina decides to tell her story and writes this book.

I think it admirable that the author shares her story at last, for the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. Stories not told now, will never be told, and another testimony will be lost. Yet I wish she had shared her story sooner, for as she admits herself, after so many years it is hard to keep things straight.

Yes, many years have passed, many things have faded from my memory, and I don't really remember the sequence of events. That is why everything I write is so chaotic... It all happened&emdash;but when? I don't really remember. Only that it all took place in the period before the Warsaw Uprising.

Despite the loose timeline and rambling style, Adina story is interesting and important. The images she describes of her work in the Children's Hospital will remain with me for a long time.

11labfs39
nov 28, 2013, 6:44 pm



74. Nancy Wake: SOE's Greatest Heroine by Russell Braddon

Nancy Wake was a brilliant student, with a difficult home life. She ran away twice and ended up in France. At the age of 23 she met and married Henri Fiocca, a wealthy man fourteen years her senior. They led a posh life in Marseille until the war broke out, and Nancy began working for the resistance. At first, she simply helped people on the run, but she became increasingly involved as a courier and helped British airmen escape from German prisons. Eventually, however, the Gestapo began following the agent they called The White Mouse, and, Nancy's devoted husband decided that she must leave France for her own safety.

This was a turning point for Nancy, because after this she was always on the run and always completely committed to the Resistance. It took her six attempts, but she finally made it out of France. Nancy became one of only thirty-nine women to join the SOE and, after some training, parachuted back into France. At one point, she was the British liaison for over 7000 Marquis. She proved to be daring, brave, and incredibly lucky.

I first heard about Nancy Wake in the context of a different biography, a new one by Peter FitzSimons. However, when I looked at reviews of the two books, the older, Braddon biography received better reviews. Certainly Braddon had a leg up on FitzSimons, in that he interviewed Nancy Wake himself. He was also completely enamored with her, which may have colored his treatment of her story. Despite the potential bias, Nancy Wake was an amazing person and her story is colorful and full.

12.Monkey.
nov 29, 2013, 3:49 am

Wow, what a woman! That sounds like an amazing history to read about.

13labfs39
dec 14, 2013, 10:22 pm

Very much so. Thanks, Monkey!

14labfs39
dec 14, 2013, 10:22 pm



80. The True German: The Diary of a World War II Military Judge by Otto Mueller-Hill, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase

By March of 1944, Otto Mueller-Hill knew that Germany would lose the war. A Nazi and military judge, Mueller was stationed in Strasbourg not far from his wife and son in Freiburg. A German patriot and fervent Badenite, Mueller decided to start a journal in which to record the last days of the war and his opinions on how Germany came to lose it.

The journal is interesting because Mueller is intelligent and frank about the condition of the German military and the belligerence of the Nazi leadership in continuing to fight when the war was obviously lost. He includes references to propaganda speeches and newspaper articles that are well referenced in the notes. I was particularly intrigued by his casual references to the fate of the Jews in the concentration camps; obviously not all Germans were innocent of knowledge of their fate. In addition, I knew little about the role of military judges in furthering the Nazi line through their rulings on soldiers' crimes of speech or deed.

However. I had a very hard time assessing whether I believed Mueller to be free of an ulterior motive in keeping the journal. His son, who allowed the journal to be published, obviously believes that his father kept the journal as a true sign of his loyalty to Germany but opposition to Nazism. To me it was less clear, and I couldn't help but feel that Mueller would have found the diary a convenient piece of evidence if and when he was charged with war crimes. To only start the journal when he knew the war was lost, and to be specific in his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi leadership, seemed a bit contrived.

The movement was a bit slow in places, but the real detraction was the translation. Although I do not speak German, jaunty idioms such as "shoot the breeze", "put out to pasture", and the like, were distracting in their dissimilitude to the rest of Mueller's language.

Although I hate to disregard any primary sources, and there are some interesting comments, such as those regarding the Allied strategy and the relative fighting prowess of the different armies, overall I was hard pressed to accept the diary at face value. How do we interpret something that may have been written to appease the coming conquerors?

15labfs39
dec 20, 2013, 2:07 pm



81. Beyond Courage: The Untold Story of Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by Doreen Rappaport

I received this young adult book as a gift and was immediately delighted by the wealth of photographs. A diagram of the Bielski partisan camp in Naliboki Forest caught my eye, and I began reading. The book is arranged in several parts: realization, saving children, ghettos, camps, and partisan warfare. Each part contains the stories of several people: Jews and sometimes the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to help them. It appears the author tried to pick children and young people for inclusion, as often as possible, in order to further the book's appeal to young adults.

Some of the stories, such as that of the Bielski brothers, were already known to me. Others were known in their generality, if not particulars, like the Kindertransports. Still other accounts were completely new to me, such as the story of Mordechai "Motele" Gildenman, age 12, who spied on the Nazis in the guise of a cafe performer and later bombed the cafe.

While I enjoyed the book and value the photographs and accounts, I was a bit disappointed with the simplicity of the historical sections, which gave background information. Although not designed as a history of the Holocaust, I thought the glossing over of some of the complexities was a disservice to the reader. I was also disappointed to find that the photographs frequently used as background to the text were not reproduced elsewhere, such as in an appendix. I found myself straining to try and discern the subject of a photo, even when it was labeled, because it was so faint behind the text. It's a nice idea, I just wish the publishers had reproduced the photos elsewhere for better viewing.

Overall, I would still recommend the book, as I think the role of Jewish resistance, even if it is resistance in the form of escape or survival, is often minimized. Armed uprisings at death camps are often left out of Holocaust histories, I think because so few Jews survived them. But they are important, and their inclusion here might help young Jews get a more balanced picture of Jewish resistance and its cost.

16labfs39
dec 23, 2013, 5:00 pm



82. Rue du Retour by Abdellatif Laâbi, translated from the French by Jacqueline Kaye

Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi was arrested in 1972 for "crimes of opinion" expressed in his poetry and the literary journals he had founded. He was tortured, imprisoned, released, rearrested, and finally, after several hunger strikes, given a trial in which he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment. International organizations such as Amnesty International and the French PEN group mounted a campaign on his behalf, and Laâbi was released after eight and a half years. His passport was taken and he was denied work, but eventually, again with the aid of other writers, he was allowed to emigrate to France, where he lives with his wife and children. This book, which translates to "the road back", is an account not of his time in prison, per se, but of his release and readjustment to society. His prison experiences are glimpsed in flashbacks which haunt him in the days, weeks, and years after his release.

Rue du Retour is a short work, only 180 pages, but is emotionally dense and draining. It begins Free. Old salt of the prison seas. You are free. Like a refrain, this image recurs as his memories overwhelm him then recede, leaving him ashore, but forever marked by his sojourn. At first, his focus continually shifts back and forth between the present and prison, but slowly he spends more time in the present and reflecting rather than reliving. One note: he writes in the second person when referring to himself.

You experienced a first moulting, then a second. Each day on waking up you left in your bed an old skin which detached itself from you during a nightmare where you traversed one cave after another, cellars of executed criminals, where you came to a halt at the last moment at the edge of a precipice whose bottom you could not see. It was not a single paralysed or atrophied limb that you had to re-educate slowly through massage and gradual exercise. You needed time to fit together the two separated parts of your being, to stitch them together. You needed time to look, feel, hear and touch with the ordinary faculties of a man who can cross the road nonchalantly...

The decision to write of his experiences was not an easy one for Laâbi. Even when locked in his tiny cell, he felt that his fate was communal. That not only did he continue to be one of many suffering prisoners, but that his country itself was a fellow prisoner.

Those doubts and the great anxiety would assail you because you had always refused to be a literary bureaucrat and an exorcist of your individual ghosts. Because for you there has never been any question of shutting yourself up in a confessional to reconstitute a shadow theatre of your private hells. To write, even when you believed your cry would rise above all the others, was like a public scalping, an ordeal. You lived it and performed it with the others. The blood and the sweat of your anonymous brothers was the incense whose smoke rose from your unruly brain and allowed "the demon of poetry" to speak with your voice and to give it the timbre of popular outcry, the unbearable clamour of last judgements and of shipwrecks. To write was to collide, body against body, to march in the march. You would never get out unscathed.

Despite this communal intent, Laâbi's writing is intensely personal and emotive. In the book, he refers to his wife as "Awdah", Arabic for "return". She plays an important role both in the way he experiences imprisonment and in his reintegration. He often addresses her in the most private of tones, but at the same time as his means of Awdah/return. The interplay of the personal and the public blurs boundaries, much as his writing (a mix of poetry and prose) blurs lines of genre, and his mixed use of Arabic and French blur notions of nationality and colonialism. The book is a memoir, a political statement, a philosophy, and a cry for peace and hope for his homeland.

Rue du Retour is the type of book that benefits from close reading, rereads, and discussion. There is so much packed into its small package. I read the autobiographical novel of his childhood, The Bottom of the Jar, shortly after this, and it was interesting to compare the stark, philosophical tone of the first with the happy, nostalgic feel of the second. In addition, at least two collections of his poetry have been translated into English.

17labfs39
dec 26, 2013, 10:24 pm



83. The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz

People may be willing to do anything to escape from imprisonment, but walking over 4,000 miles from the Siberian snowfields through the Gobi Desert, and over the Himalayas to India, has got to be one of the most ambitious. But some people will let nothing stand in their way.

Slavomir Rawicz was a calvary officer in the Polish Home Army and fought the Germans at the beginning of World War II. When Poland capitulated and the Soviet Union invaded from the East, Rawicz returned to Pinsk in November 1939 to await further orders. He had barely entered his house when the NKVD arrested him for being a spy. He was held in horrible conditions first in a prison in Minsk, then the notorious Kharkov Prison, as interrogators tried unsuccessfully to break him. Finally, after a year, he was transferred to the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow and faced a farcical trial, where he was sentenced to twenty five years of forced labor.

A cattle train took him from Moscow 3000 miles across the Urals and much of Siberia to Lake Baikal. There he and 5000 other men were chained together and forced to walk behind trucks north into the Siberian winter. In this manner, they covered another 1000 miles, reaching Camp 303 in February 1941. After this ordeal, life in a gulag was almost easy. Only 25 years old, Slavomir was still strong in body and spirit and decided that he had to escape. With some assistance from an unlikely source, Slavomir and a handpicked group of six other prisoners succeed in breaking out of the camp, but that was only step one. The biggest challenge would be to get to a country where they knew they would be safe: they decided on India.

Having only the vaguest idea of the geography or the true challenge of places like the Gobi or Himalayas, they strike south. Along the way they pick up an escapee of a different sort, a young woman named Kristina. Together they faced impossible physical and mental strains as they worked their way out of the snows of Siberia and across Mongolia. Completely unprepared, they reach the Gobi…

The account of the trek is horrifying in its difficulties and uplifting in the spirit of those attempting it. I was thoroughly spellbound from the first page, and impressed by the author’s decency and lack of ego. The book is an adventure, a memoir of the gulag system, and, at the risk of sounding trite, a testimony to the human spirit. Highly recommended.

18Helenliz
dec 27, 2013, 3:36 am

I read The Long Walk this year as well. There seems to be some debate about if it is actually an account of his escape, or a composite account. Whatever the truth of the matter, I agree with you, it stands as a reminder of what we tale for granted.

19labfs39
dec 30, 2013, 12:09 pm

Hi Helen, I didn't learn about the controversy until after I read the book, which allowed me to enjoy the book, but left me feeling duped. But then I read more about it, and it seems someone may have made the journey, so I feel better. Even as fiction, it was a god tale though!