Book Description
In this gripping graphic novel, artist Pascal Croci tells the horrifying story of the World War II concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Using the fictional story of a couple-Kazik and Cessia-who lose a daughter at the camp and barely survive themselves, Croci depicts the horror and brutality of the Holocaust in grim, searing, black-and-white illustrations. Based on extensive interviews Croci conducted with concentration-camp survivors, this book tells its story with the immediacy and disturbing reality of actual historical events.
Customer Reviews:
What a Book!.......2006-08-30
I have read everything I can get my hands on about the Holocaust since I was 15 years old. I am now 65, so you can tell I have had a lot of reading.
This book tells the story I was very familiar with, but in a unique way! The art work in the book was very good and illustrates the events factually. For a unique perspective on the Holocaust, I recommend this book highly.
Apocalypse Then.......2006-03-04
Obviously the shadow of Art Spiegelman's acclaimed Maus books fall long over any graphic story relating the Holocaust. Fortunately Croci's oversized book takes a very different visual approach, using grim pencil illustrations toned with gray watercolor washes to create an oppressively bleak monochrome world. The story is about a couple who manage to survive internment at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but not without losing their daughter. Their straightforward tale takes the form of a lengthy flashback bookended by their plight somewhere in former Yugoslavia, circa 1993. (This tie to present-day ethnic cleansing, while admirable in spirit, feels a forced and awkward.) Faced with imminent discovery and execution by unnamed forces, the couple recounts to each other their experience at Auschwitz. Their memories share the nightmarish brutality of all Holocaust survivor stories, and Croci's expressionist-influenced and heavily researched artwork brings it all to awful life. From the gaunt forms of the inmates to the hooded dark eyes of the camp guards and officers, there is no humor, no respite, none of the ridiculous "Life is Beautiful" hope, just the haunted, bitter resignation of captured prey. At the back of the book, Croci discusses his obvious influences (Lanzmann's Shoah documentary, Spielberg's film Schindler's List, and Bernadac's book The Naked Mannequins) as well as how his own interviews with survivors shaped the work. The ultimate tone of the book can perhaps best be captured in his statement "Nazi violence is beyond forgiveness." There are a few missteps, such as the lifting of an incident from Schindler's List, and the rather strange misspelling of Mengele, but on the whole it does what all Holocaust literature ought to: horrify.
Rent "Schindler's List" Instead.......2006-02-17
I do feel the story of the concentration camps should be told, but I didn't really get a feeling of authenticity from this book. It felt more like a comic-book adaptation of the Auschwitz scene in "Schindler's List," right down to the kid making the "slit throat" gesture by the train. Chilling in Spielberg's movie, obviously ripped off in this graphic novel.
I did not care for the amateurish drawings in the book, either--the figures looked very stiff, the eyes all wide open, with weird expressions. Perhaps the artist did this on purpose, but I was left with the opinion he just wasn't very good.
Finally, the language was jarringly anachronistic, I don't believe children were referred to as "kids" as regularly as they are these days. And for a book allegedly painstakingly researched, you'd think they'd realize that the "Angel of Death" at the camp was "Mengele" not "Mendela." I believe this might have been the fault of a translator, but it is a pretty glaring oversight.
I give it two stars for attempting a historical graphic novel, but no more because it's "research" seems to be limited to a couple of interviews and previous fictional accounts.
A dark look at an even darker time.......2005-02-10
I've been looking for good graphic novels about the Holocaust ever since I read Maus and Maus II back in 6th grade. I'm a college sophomore now, and happened upon Croci's book in our university library.
This book is very disturbing, and thus very powerful. Croci's people, Jews and Germans, are drawn in a wide-eyed, ghoulish manner. No one smiles. Still, there is beauty to be found in the figures and faces he creates. He cites inspiration from the film "Schindler's List," but it only seems to exist in the black and white of his work. The sense of hope in Spielberg's film, of one man's humanity, is no where to be found.
I did not find this to be as engaging as Maus of "Schindler" because none of the characters are given a personality. Stepping back, it makes sense (even more so when you read Croci's extensive interview in the back). He has stripped every person down to the fragments that are left when your only thought is of survival. This does not make the story very engaging--rather you find yourself turning page after page to see what atrocity lies next.
That said, I still reccommend this book. It's something you will want to discuss after you read it. It's art is as powerful as the photos we have of this terrible place. Of note is the gas chamber sequence, unveiled by a mist of poison when the Jew workers open the doors to burn the bodies. It's consistently dark, inhuman tone is perhaps a more accurate vision of the Holocaust than the humanity presented by Spielberg. It's not a read you'll soon forget.
I would also reccommend this as a book for children 10 and up, because it is VERY disturbing at times and seems more written for adults. You know your child better than anyone else, so flip through and make your own judgment first. I for one will not get that gas chamber image out of my head for a long time.
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- Not your typical sf, and better for it
- Ever wanted to be super smart?
- Sorcerers of Death's Construction
- Overshadowed by "Flowers for Algernon"
- Camp Tedium: A Bore
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Camp Concentration: A Novel
Thomas M. Disch
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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334: A Novel
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The Genocides
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The Sheep Look Up
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The Female Man (Bluestreak)
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Babel-17/Empire Star
ASIN: 0375705457
Release Date: 1999-04-27 |
Amazon.com
Thomas M. Disch is one of the overlooked masters of science fiction, and Camp Concentration is one of his finest novels. The unlikely hero of this piece is Louis Sacchetti, an overweight poet who's serving a five-year prison term for being a "conchie," or conscientious objector, to the ongoing war being fought by the United States. Three months into his sentence, Sacchetti is mysteriously taken from prison and brought to Camp Archimedes, an underground compound run by General Humphrey Haast. This is the so-called "camp concentration" of the book's title, a strange oubliette where inmates are given a drug that will raise their intelligence to astounding levels, though it will also kill them in a matter of months.
Sacchetti's job is to chronicle the goings-on at Archimedes in a daily journal that is sent to Haast and other select members of the project. Through his writings, readers get to know the various characters that inhabit the camp, geniuses whose intellectual fires burn brightly even while their bodies slowly go cold. Although these latter-day Einsteins are supposed to be thinking up new ways of killing the enemy, most of the inmates are instead focusing their studies on alchemy, which Haast hopes will allow them to discover the secret of immortality.
Camp Concentration is one of those SF books that falls squarely into the "literature" category both for the eloquence of Disch's writing and the timelessness of his ruminations on life and war. This is a thoughtful novel that offers insights into human existence, and it will likely stay with readers long after they have turned the last page. Ursula K. Le Guin summed up the book best in her cover blurb, which says simply: "It is a work of art, and if you read it, you will be changed." --Craig E. Engler
Customer Reviews:
Not your typical sf, and better for it.......2006-06-23
Highly literary, 'Camp Concentration' began life as a serialized novel published in 'New Worlds' - the showcase magazine for the British New Wave movement in SF at the end of the 1960s. This movement wanted to revitalize SF by improving the writing and exploring psychology instead of other worlds. This novel attains both of those goals. Indeed, Disch's command of prose is amazing, and in a Pynchon-like fashion he refers to historical people/events and other literary works regularly. A good dictionary is also a plus in reading this, as well as access to language translation programs. But unlike Pychon, you can still follow the fairly chronological story without looking up references and definitions (although there is a purposefully difficult section towards the end - don't worry, I said purposefully - it's supposed to convey an almost manic intelligence bordering on insanity, so I don't think we're supposed to understand all of it).
This is no derivation of 'Flowers for Algernon.' Nor is this meant to be a fast-paced plot driven book. It is instead a meditation on intelligence, governmental abuse, conscientious objection, science vs. alchemy vs. religion, the purpose of art, ethics, etc. This, along with '334,' is Disch at his finest.
Ever wanted to be super smart? .......2006-01-21
I have to admit that I would never have picked up the book if I hadn't seen the cover with the barcode on the back of the neck of the person with the shaved head. Sometimes a cover can really help sell a book!
I loved this book despite its minor flaws. It did leave me with a number of questions and one is left to their own conclusions as to how it will all play out after the final page has been read, but for those who love a read that makes you think, this is for you.
As a prior reviewer comments, it really does remind me of linguistic feats of The Crying Of Lot 47 by Pynchon or even his Gravity's Rainbow. It is not an easy read, given the vocabulary level necessary to relay what is happenign and much is left out, but it is nevertheless very rewarding.
Sorcerers of Death's Construction.......2005-08-16
"Camp Concentration" reads as an early foray of what would later be called the "New Wave" of SF: literary and countercultural, in the vein of Dick, Delany and LeGuin. Whereas "Golden Age" SF writers were in thrall to the "American Dream," here we begin to see the darkness of the realities of power.
Louis Saccheti (shades of Sacco-Vanzetti?) comes off as a rather bland and bloated fellow early in the novel, primarily concerned with the prison food he is being served as a conscientious objector to the massive nuclear war being waged by the U.S. However, we then witness his transformation after the government injects him with a syphilis-derivative spirochete which multiplies his intelligence as it consumes his body within months (see the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment).
As Sacchetis' intellect explodes, so does his vocabulary, sending me scrambling to look up several words per page in the unabridged dictionary. Saccheti's intellect also manifests itself as the loss of his religious faith, sending him back to the atheism of his teens. An interesting idea: perhaps the flights of hormonal teenage minds are closer to "genius" than the dulled edges of their elders'.
The book is not perfect. In the middle, we take a lenghty detour when some of the geniuses try to perfect the ancient magick of alchemy with the philosopher's egg, and the general in charge of the camp buys it all hook, line, and sinker. I found it somewhat unbelievable (even though it is well-established that some of our past senile Commanders-in-Chief subscribed wholeheartedly to astrology).
I found it interesting how the story of the camp concentrated much of human history, beginning with aspirations towards alchemical magick, and ending with a confrontation between an absolute, Naziesque scientific materialism and the poetic dreams of Saccheti. Disch has managed to fit much of the human story into this slim allegorical volume.
Overshadowed by "Flowers for Algernon".......2005-03-22
For all its good points, Disch's "Camp Concentration" is and always will be overshadowed by "Flowers for Algernon." And for good reason. Simply put - "Agernon" is a more emotional story - especially in its novella form, which also prefigures Disch's book by some time.
However, taken on its own, "Camp Concentration" has some lovely prose, ideas and exciting twists. Perhaps the problem is it could have been so much more.
My favorite scene is when we first meet George. Disch manages to give us such a creepy and enigmatic meeting. If he had concentrated on the mystery of who these people were and how the drug manifests changes to their intelligence more than what they say, the book would have been better.
Not much else to say that hasn't already been said. Fun, short read. Just not what it might have been.
Camp Tedium: A Bore.......2004-11-30
Tripe, its own self.
I've watched grass grow with more verve and enthusiasm. Disch is an author who was let in when the publishers opened the sci-fi floodgates in the mid-60s...and it shows.
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- The Awful Truth
- A journey into human suffering and the will to survive!
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This Blinding Absence of Light
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
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ASIN: 014303572X |
Book Description
An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by internationally renowned author Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the Prix Mahgreb. Crafting real life events into narrative fiction, Ben Jelloun reveals the horrific story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies in underground cells with no light and only enough food and water to keep them lingering on the edge of death. Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben Jelloun narrates the story in the simplest of language and delivers a shocking novel that explores both the limitlessness of inhumanity and the impossible endurance of the human will.
Customer Reviews:
The Awful Truth.......2005-09-26
The descriptor,'awesome', assumes unique resonance with this book. In 1971 a Morroccan military insurrection failed in its bid to overthrow the monarchical rule. Over 50 soliers were tried and this chronicles a 'pilgim's progress' of the subsequent imprisonment. Only four of our narrator's comrades in their subterranean cell block survived the 18 years of cramped darkness. Their bodies shrank. Their teeth rotted.The means of attrition are appalling. We hear the deaths occuring around them. Strangely, as I worked through this revelatory account, I gradually recognised the voice of displacement, insight and rigour I'd encountered as an adolescent whilst reading Camus', L'Stranger'. A mere 10 pages after this familiarity crystallised, our narrator indeed arrives at his recollections of the Camus piece, 'reading'it, as he did many other literary samples, to sustain his fellows. That said, this is one powerful piece of writing. Tahar Ben Jelloun has sourced the story from one of the four survivors. Authors may have succeeded in fictionalising such a scenario. But I know of none that have charted the painful disintegration of body and soul under extremis. War traumas, plane crashes in the Andes, spiritual revelations through self-imposed deprivations, fictions like Jim Crace's,'Quarantine', with all their virtues, will be assessed against the quality of this narrative. It is an astonishing triumph for man and his imagination.
A journey into human suffering and the will to survive!.......2002-11-23
I picked this book up from the libary and entered a world where untold cruelty and human suffering were a daily part of life. I finished this book about a week ago, and it is still affecting me. No longer do I complain or feel sorry for myself. It is a story that needed to be told. Put this on every American's "to read list" as after you read it, you will never be the same.
Book Description
"I love this book from beginning to end. It is a classic."-Ernest J. Gaines
This autobiographical novel depicts a teenage girl's experience in the Nazi concentration camps. As in
The Diary of Anne Frank, Tania's youthful concerns are interwoven among accounts of extremity: her brother's murder, her mother's choice to stay with her father and die in the gas chamber rather than be transported to another camp, the saving friendships Tania develops, her relationships with young men and the guards. Throughout the novel we see claustrophobic uncertainty, grief, terror, exhaustion, and Tania's sustaining hope. Her return to Prague after the war is unforgettable and devastating, as she observes people wearing "normal" clothes, eating ice cream, and traveling on buses between work and home. There is no judgment, only the reality of two worlds existing simultaneously.
Zdena Berger was born in 1925 in Prague, where she lived until the Nazi occupation. She spent the war years as a prisoner of Terezin, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Berger returned to Prague to complete her education, and then lived in Paris for nearly a decade. She immigrated to San Francisco in 1955 and now lives with her husband in the Bay Area.
Tell Me Another Morning is her only book.
Customer Reviews:
Humanity Transcendent.......2007-07-30
This is a beautiful, beautiful book. Everyone should read it-- it is a real testament to the power of friendship and the strength of the human spirit in the midst of unthinkable horror. The prose is elegant, spare and devoid of self-pity.
Finding Hope in the Ashes of Indifference.......2007-05-29
"Tell Me Another Morning" must be read as a companion piece to "Diary of Anne Franck." Anne's story ended when her family was discovered and dispersed to concentration camps. Tania (Zdena Berger) tells the story Anne couldn't, the struggle of a young girl and two friends to survive in the camps under the most impersonal and banal evil mankind is capable of inflicting.
Our dramas are populated with monsters in human form expending great energy and taking huge enjoyment in dispensing evil. We are fascinated as they revel in horror.
Zdena Berger shows us the other, more chilling face of evil. Tania faced one wholly different and vastly greater, the evil of indifference of one human to the humanity of another, multiplied thousands of times. Towards the end it is shocking that the faceless guards pull a cruel joke by adding glass to the prisoners' bread, because until that point the guards seemed too indifferent to suffering to take any pleasure in causing or even noticing it.
The three friends, Ilse, Eva, and Tania, grew during their trials, drawing strength and gaining character as their oppressors shrank into pitiful caricatures. Clearly none of them could have survived without the others, as each did small, selfless acts at times that helped her friends to find strength and courage to go on. Once, after charming chocolate from male prisoners, Ilse gave it all to Eva and led Tania in pretending that they were sharing it so that Eva did not know she had the only piece.
"Tell Me Another Morning" is painstakingly crafted, and fills a high position on my personal list of best books. It is Zdena's only book, and her story is a classic for all times and should never again be allowed to go out of print.
I will never forget the friendship and courage of Tania, Eva, and Ilse, and I encourage all to join them on their immortal quest, powered by hope, to rekindle humanity from the ashes of indifference.
Singing in the Dark Times.......2007-05-29
Zdena Berger's "Tell Me Another Morning" documents and depicts the worst of humanity-- the atrocities inflicted on innocent people in times of war. Yet her story, written in poetically charged prose, is ultimately a testament to love and compassion, and reading it is an empathy-building experience. The effect of Berger's book recalls Bertold Brecht's poem: In the dark times/ Will there also be singing?/ Yes there will be singing/ About the dark times.
Lucid and immensely moving.......2007-05-16
Beautifully written, amazingly hopeful. It accomplishes through fiction what is almost too hard to read in memoir form -- what it was like to be a teenage girl in the concentration camps. I agree with Ernest Gaines -- this really is a classic. Rare today, but true.
Extraordinary book.......2007-05-12
Holocaust literature has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decades.
This book is the most unusual book for even those who cannot read anymore on the Holocaust.
It is the autobiographical story of three teen age girls who somehow manage to get through the war going to Terezin, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen. The language of this book is poetic and simple. The Nazis are the men in the
"green uniforms" but they are never described as Nazis.
This book is beautifully written and its power is in its simplicity and touches on deep emotions of the soul.
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- Commentary on Family Relationships
- A piece of Dutch History silenced for 50 years
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My Father's War: A Novel (New Press International Fiction Series)
Adriaan Van Dis
Manufacturer: New Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 156584033X |
Amazon.com
Adriaan van Dis employs masterful skill in telling this rich story of a Dutch man who, in midlife, is coming to terms with the losses in his life and their effect on his family. His half sister's death revives memories of his father, a Dutch soldier who spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp only to die in the Netherlands when the narrator was 11. The drama unfolds as he uncovers the complicated history of his family and realizes what he remembers of his father doesn't match the recollections of others. That this book can address themes as diverse as sibling relationships, child abuse, war, and repressed memories with such subtlety and even a touch of humor is testament to both the quality of van Dis's writing and the expertise of his translator, Claire Nicolas White.
Customer Reviews:
Commentary on Family Relationships .......2005-03-18
I am not sure what to make of this book, as it was all a little disjointed and in the air. I suppose that is the feeling that readers are meant to be given as that is what the protagonist has had to live with, having gotten information on his family in bits and pieces and never really knowing what the reality is. Is reality an absolute or is it subjective and personal? The novel is an interesting piece of work commenting on the legacies of war as well as secrecy within a family - how damaging both are and how it self-perpetuates. When the narrator was not having an amusing aside, the tenderness in his tone came through which symbolised the love-hate relationship he had with his father. Not an easy read, but has valuable insights and comments.
A piece of Dutch History silenced for 50 years.......1997-06-04
A hidden past revealed when a son finally
faces the silence of the memories
of a father and mother who were caught in Indonesia during WWII. Their son describes the
horror, the fate, and family failures in a dark
story. Excellent translation.
Customer Reviews:
A valuable document of the Japanese American experience.......2003-04-25
Hisaye Yamamoto was not a prolific writer, but her output of fine short stories spans decades. Central themes include assimilation and the loss of traditional cultural values, troubled marraiges, and, of course, the shameful internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. As a writer who was raised in the culture and who originally published many of these stories in Japanese American publications for a largely Japanese American audience, she produces uniquely authentic accounts of a lifestyle that has largely disappeared. Here are the farms, the oil fields, the New Year's celebrations, the dusty internment camps, the tragic generation gaps, the hopes, dreams, and loneliness of a people who are inclined to remain quiet about personal matters--these stories present a fully developed portrait of the Japanese experience in American and its consequences. Highly recommended.
Stories of Asian-American life.......2001-10-15
"Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories," by Hisaye Yamamoto, was first published in 1988. The revised and expanded edition adds 4 more stories, for a total of 19. Yamamoto was born in 1921 in California to parents who were immigrants from Japan, and hers is one of the most remarkable voices in 20th century United States literature. These stories originally were written or published between 1942 and 1995, and thus represent many decades of Yamamoto's literary career.
Her style is a blend of delicacy and determined passion. The book as a whole strikes a balance between tragedy and tenderness, and her best stories are quite moving. Yamamoto's stories mainly have Japanese-American female protagonists, and offer glimpses into many decades of Japanese-American life. Some topics include troubled marriages, crippling addictions, racism, and relations among the many ethnic groups of the U.S.
Some stories deal with the experience of Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in concentration camps by their own government during World War II. Other important themes include the human toll of World War II on those Japanese Americans who lost family members in the war, and the cultural shift between generations in Japanese-American families.
The four new stories in the expanded edition are "Death Rides the Rails in Poston," a murder mystery; "Eucalyptus," about a woman's experience in a mental facility; "A Fire in Fontana," about a Japanese-American woman's connection to the African-American community; and "Florentine Gardens," which centers around a visit to a military cemetery in Italy.
Hisaye Yamamoto's work is highly regarded by many, and many of her stories have been anthologized (which is how I first read her work). It is wonderful to have her stories brought together in one volume; I feel richer for having read "Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories." One final note: as a fitting complement to the title story of this collection, I recommend Richard Wright's book "Haiku: This Other World."
A Rewarding Read.......2001-04-24
I read 17 Syllables for an English class, and it will be one of the books that I won't sell back. My favorite stories were Las Vegas Charlie, Legend of Miss Sasagawara, and 17 Syllables. Many of the stories describe Asian characters trying to find their niche in America. Themes include generational and cultural conflicts, addiction struggles, and financial insecurities. Yamamoto seems to take a minimalist approach to her writing, which encourages one to reread her stories in order to extract more information.
Gem-like stories.......2000-04-27
These stories are beautiful, sensitive, thoughtful, and occasionally painful in their depiction of the condition, not only of Japanese- Americans, but of anyone who lives slightly off the beaten track. She writes with kindness, humor, and insight. I especially liked "The Legend of Miss Sassasagawara" and "Wilshire Bus," as well as the interview with her. Her stories remind me of Faulkner's and Flannery O'Connor's. If she had written more, I am certain she would have been better known.
Very good reading.......1999-07-30
So much more intricate than at first glance. If you grow weary of the usual themes of the Asian-American experience, you will find this collection remarkable in its originality, especially considering the first story was written in 1948. A wonderful book to read.
Customer Reviews:
the history behind Ka-Tzetnik's books.......2007-01-31
Yehiel Feiner was born in Poland in 1917.During the German occupation of Poland he was first in a ghetto and then in Auschwitz, where, according to his own account, he escaped from a selection despite the fact that he had already been reduced to the level of a Mussulman (Muselmann), that is, a living skeleton, in the parlance of the inmates. He once more escaped from a death march only moments before the prisoners were executed by their SS guards (who then proceeded to put on the prison uniforms of the dead so as to avoid punishment by the Red Army). Feiner came to Palestine as part of the Brihah operation organized by the Jewish Brigade and the Haganah and changed his name to Dinur, or "of fire" in Aramaic (the name may also be associated with the Hebrew word "din," which can mean trial, justice, and punishment, and especially with the Dinur river mentioned in the Book of Daniel and interpreted by the Kabbalah as "a river of fire in the upper reaches of hell that descends upon the evil after their death to purify them"). For the next four decades he devoted himself to writing on his own experience in the camps, on the fate of his parents, siblings, and wife, who all died in the Holocaust, and on his post-Auschwitz life in Israel and his struggle to build a new identity while remaining totally obsessed with the genocide he had survived.
Until the early 1960s Dinur retained his anonymity. His books were all published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik, which is derived from the German acronym for concentration camp (KZ for Konzentrationslager) and was a commonly used term among the inmates (but may also be associated with Kafka's character K.). His identity was revealed during the Eichmann trial, where his testimony, which was cut short when he collapsed in the courtroom and was ushered to a hospital, made public his assertion that Auschwitz was "another planet," that is, a universe in which the conventional rules and customs of human civilization did not apply.
Piepel, is the story of Harry's young brother Moni, who is made into the servant and sexual slave of various barracks commanders in Auschwitz until he too is finally killed (such child prostitutes were called Piepel in the jargon of the camps, a term apparently derived from the German provincial word for lad and penis).
Ka-Tzetnik, for his part, is almost never able to distance himself from the experience of the camps. Reading Ka-Tzetnik, we are in the midst of the horror; there is no control here, no embarrassment, no qualifications. Indeed, Ka-Tzetnik does what Primo Levi ultimately reproaches himself for having been unable to accomplish, namely, he writes from the point of view of the drowned, the Mussulman, the living skeleton who no longer has a consciousness. Nor is his writing on horror in any way contrived and precisely because of its wholly uninhibited, raw nature, his representation of evil is not only disturbing but in many ways annihilating of the manner in which we all desire to see and understand the interaction between humanity and the Holocaust.
Wiesel and Ka-Tzetnik, who have gone through the same hell of Auschwitz, offer a wholly different perspective on their experience. While Wiesel is the more sophisticated and controlled of the two, he is consequently also far more contrived, and his account bears the characteristics of well-crafted, skillful, didactic rhetoric, which may also partly explain his successes among the French- and English-reading public. Wiesel's kitsch, his bombastic utterances and exclamations about the human condition in the mode of French Existentialism fashionable when he wrote much of his Night trilogy, has appealed both to youthful readers and to a more adult public searching for a palatable representation of the Holocaust and its implications for humanity. Conversely, Ka-Tzetnik's anguished, at times almost insane, obsession with depravity, his wild fantasies, and his anarchic refusal to conform to any rules of the genre have barred him from gaining attention in cultures that prefer a well-told story, insist on close attention to matters aesthetic, require some moral lesson, and instinctively reject such baffling, messy, and often repelling accounts. At his best, his kitsch is of such an extraordinary nature that it penetrates the most hidden, darkest, and most repulsive recesses of the human psyche. Yet the very core of these two writers' oeuvres is almost uncannily alike, to the extent that they seem to present two versions of the same experience: a young traditional Jew's encounter with limitless evil.
Yehiel Dinur collapsed in the courtroom during the Eichmann trial shortly after he revealed that he was indeed the writer Ka-Tzetnik, that man without a name who had written those harrowing tales from the "other planet" of Auschwitz. Hence he seems to have been overcome by his inability to link his two personae, rigidly kept apart all those years precisely because bringing them together again might have precipitated a mental crisis and thereby prevented him from continuing his life's work. In the trial Dinur was asked by the judge: "Why did you hide behind the pen-name Ka-Tzetnik?" To which he replied: "This is not a pen-name. I do not see myself as an author who writes literature. This is a chronicle from the planet of Auschwitz, whose inhabitants had no names, they were neither born nor bore any children; they were neither alive nor dead. They breathed according to different laws of nature. Every fraction of a minute there revolved on a different time scale. They were called Ka-Tzetnik, they were skeletons with numbers."
Reading Ka-Tzetnik is an unsettling, disturbing experience. Just as he employs a multitude of clichés and banalities when writing on normality, so too he shatters all the clichés and banalities about atrocity that we hold dear; just as he maintains the tone of a wide-eyed adolescent when describing love and friendship in conventional times, so too he uncovers with almost unequaled power and deeply troubling relish the seemingly unlimited human capacity, among victims and perpetrators alike, for betrayal and sadism, hate and perversity, in the infernal regions of the Auschwitz. If the Nazis are always in the background of the evil he portrays, his attention is focused much more on the disintegration of even the most basic human relationships and moral codes among the inmates, the cruelty of the Kapos, the murderous instincts to which hunger, deprivation, and humiliation give rise, the fall of those who under other circumstances would have been the most admired members of a community. Very few figures retain their humanity for long in his version of the camps, and the isolated figures that do so are quickly destroyed precisely because of their failure to adapt to that new and for them unacceptable world. Underlying his representation of the Holocaust, even if rarely asserted, is the assumption that only those who adapted by shedding their humanity, forsaking their loved ones, their faith, indeed leaving their old selves behind in the crematoria, had even the faintest chance of surviving.
A must read.......2002-12-27
I have read a great deal on the subject of the holocaust but no other book so poiniently and with brutal honesty tells the real horros that the Jewish victims suffered at the hands of the cruel germans in Aushwitz. Each chapter portrays vividly a heart wrenthing scene that cannot be forgotten. In addition to the seering detail (which is all true) the author is also able to use symbolism through the characters to convey certain messages to the reader about the holocaust and mankind. I cannot overemphasize that this book is a must read for anyone who wants to know the truth of the horror. The details protrayed in this historical novel are so unbelievable that it leaves the reader agasp. Unfortunately, the scenes are all true and verified. If you are unfamilliar with the atrocities of the holocaust or well versed in the topic this book is an abslute must. After reeading this book you may want to read the books of this author which gives the reader background about Katzetnik's life and personality. This a book that should be read for generations so that no one forgets what happened.
an absolute must for ...everyone!.......2000-05-28
As a European 35er I've read a lot of books about the terrors of WWII. Some books were realy depressing (Primo Levi). For this book I have no words! After every page I asked myself why I kept on reading the real nightmares of Moni and Daniella, caught in the terror Camps of Nazi Germany. At the end of the book, with tears in my eyes, I understood I was obliged to Moni & Daniella to keep them in my mind for ever so they didn't suffer for nothing. I'm realy convinced that if everybody would read this book, our world would become more peaceful.
Book Description
A magnetic debut novel from world-renowned violinist Eugene Drucker
Set during the final weeks of World War II, The Savior is the story of Gottfried Keller, a young German violinist. Exempted from military service, Keller is burdened with the demoralizing task of playing for wounded soldiers in hospitals and makeshift infirmaries.
As he leaves his apartment one morning to pick up a new assignment at headquarters, Keller finds an SS driver waiting for him and is escorted without explanation to a labor camp outside his town. There he is introduced to the camp's Kommandant, who tells Keller that he will spend the next four days performing for the inmates as part of an experiment in reviving hope in those who have lost it completely.
Overwhelmed by fear and compelled by the temptation of using his talent to affect others so powerfully, Keller finds himself playing a series of concerts for the prisoners -- and seeing with his own eyes the horrifying truths within the barbed-wire fence. As he plays the music of Ysaÿe, Hindemith and Bach, most notably the searing Chaconne, Keller's own questionable past unfolds, revealing the loss of his closest friend and the Jewish fiancée from whom he fled in fear of being caught as a Jew-lover. As he bears witness to the camp's atrocities, Keller's horror toward the perpetrators and their crime begins to fade, revealing his own culpability.
Beautifully conceived and gracefully written, The Savior is a complex and illuminating character study of a man severed from his past expectations and an artist struggling with his identity in the face of human catastrophe.
Customer Reviews:
"If You Can Find A Way To Raise Their Hopes".......2007-10-09
In the final days of World War II, Gottfried Keller, a German violinist, is summoned to a labor camp where he meets the Kommandant, who tells him that he will be giving four solo concerts in four consecutive days for prisoners. He will be part of an experiment. The Kommandant perceives that the prisoners are withdrawn and without hope. He wants them to hear Bach and even Hindemith since he believes that the Jews, unlike the wounded German soldiers for whom Keller has been playing, have an affinity and appreciation for great music. Listening to great music will give them hope again.
Written by Eugene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet, THE SAVIOR is yet another horrific story of the Holocaust. While Keller in his naivete may believe the Kommandant's motives are noble, the reader is not persuaded although we can not imagine the awful events that will take place.
Mr. Drucker contrasts the awfulness of the conditions of the Jewish prisoners with the sublimity of the music Keller plays, particuarly Bach's "Chaconne." He describes music as only a musician can, one of the best things about this novel. His description of Keller's playing of the Bach "Sonata in A Minor" and its effect on the prisoners: "Three or four women crossed their arms and held themselves tight as they swayed, as though they were rocking babies. Some of the men tried to put their arms around them, to enter into their self-embrace, but the women seemed locked in private grief. The children they lost."
As the Nazis were coming to power, Keller had Jewish friends, Ernest who left for England and Marietta whom he was to have married. In the camp he meets Rudi, a guard who loves Bach but who can kill a prisoner when commanded. He reminds Keller that the two of them are not that different.
Mr. Drucker in this novel asks all the hard questions. How did these evil atrocities come about? How can a country that produced Bach also give birth to a Hitler? How can you love the glories of classical music and take another human's life? How innocent were the bystanders? Or were they bystanders?
This story reminds us that the Holocaust occurred not that long ago. Some Nazi war criminals are still alive although time is not on the side of those who seek to bring them to justice. And wasn't Martin Luther King right when he said that justice delayed is justice denied.
THE SAVIOR is a profoundly disturbing novel.
Intense.......2007-10-03
This book is quite powerful and thought provoking, even though it's a relatively quick read (a little over 200 pages). I could go on and on about the questions it brings to the mind of a reader, the subtle character development that makes one wonder whether to sympathize with or hate the main character, but I can't really describe in detail the raw FEELINGS this book provoked in me while I read it. It's another window into the terrible, unbelievable world of WWII era Germany. Unbelievable only because the further we get from the Holocaust, the more it seems like it's some sort of nightmare that got made up, something that humans couldn't possibly have allowed to happened. There is no end to the horrors that get revealed from that time, and although it is quite depressing to read about it or watch movies based on those historical events, it is a "necessary evil" that helps one feel the full spectrum of human suffering, hope, cruelty, sympathy, etc.
I would recommend this book for anyone interested in historical fiction, people who are violinists (like me) or know a great deal about music (especially Bach) or anyone who just wants a good discussion book for a bookclub.
the things that save.......2007-09-16
Well written and challenging exploration of how the conscience of individuals and communities develop. While the Holocaust is the setting, this is less a story of the Nazi genocied and much more of a study of human responnse to evil. The reader is invited to confront the conflicts that arise when confronting a moral wrong places one's personal safety in jeopardy. Who is saving whom and from what?
Wonderful, moving story.......2007-08-31
Very credible, well written, quite a heart-breaking story. One thinks one knows everything about the Holocaust, but there is always more to learn. A very good writer (and violinist!)
Spellbinding Literary Debut By An Emerson String Quartet Violinist That Offers A Profoundly Fresh Look At Nazi Germany's Evil.......2007-08-17
In the closing days of World War II, somewhere in Germany, along the rapidly receding Eastern Front, a young brilliant German violinist is torn between his passion for creating great music from the scores of great German and other classical composers, from J. S. Bach to P. Hindemith, and bittersweet memories of two friends from a prominent music school, both extremely talented classical musicians who fled Nazi Germany nearly a decade earlier due to their Jewish heritage. He finds himself unexpectedly, in the service of the SS, after spending the war performing in hospital wards for injured Wehrmacht soldiers. Violinist Gottfried Keller endures four living days in "Hell", a Nazi death camp that, at first, seems to be a mere labor camp, despite its ominous signs and portents, that Keller recognizes almost immediately upon his arrival; such as its sickly, cadaverous, starving inmates and a room filled with shoes in a large, otherwise vacant, warehouse room that he glimpses by accident. The camp's charming and intellectually sophisticated, but sadistic, Kommandant orders him to conduct a macabre experiment: determining whether thirty inmates, who have almost been starved to death, can be brought "back to life" just by hearing Keller's brilliant, rhapsodic playing over the span of these four days. For a few fleeting moments, he earns the trust, and "friendship" of Grete, one of these inmates, and Rudi, a SS guard who befriends Keller through his own keen interest in and devotion to J. S. Bach's music. But these come at a psychologically bitter price, since Keller realizes that he is almost living vicariously through his "friendship" with Grete, a bitter semblance of his love affair with Marietta, the woman whose marriage proposal he had to reject, fearful of being ostracized by both the Nazi regime and fellow local citizens for being a "Jew-lover". He also recoils in horror after hearing the young SS guard's admission of having committed heinous crimes against humanity, while still expressing a sincere, heart-felt admiration for Bach's great choral works. But, in the end, he hears the guard, Rudi, wonder aloud whether Germany's great cultural heritage can withstand its recent plunge into barbarism, and its many crimes against humanity committed by Rudi and others of his ilk.
Emerson String Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker has admirably drawn upon his father's own heroic experiences in confronting - and then successfully fleeing from - the then relatively new Nazi regime for religious and political sanctuary in the United States. From these experiences which are compelling in their right, Drucker has made a most auspicious literary debut in fiction, using Keller's emotional and intellectual struggles with his personal demons as a fictional metaphor to look anew at Germany's cultural heritage, in the light of the Holocaust, wondering whether that heritage deserved its survival and transmission to later generations. It is indeed truly a most compelling exploration of the bestial horrors committed by the Nazis in the "defense" of the Aryan Race; one that is destined to become a classic of Holocaust literature. Drucker's emotionally riveting prose is truly both unforgettable and disturbing, especially in the scenes of the "selected" inmates listening to Keller's exquisite violin playing and finally, during the dark, horrific conclusion to the Kommandant's "experiment". Without question this is one of the most important books published this year in the United States, and among the finest examples of recently-published fiction that I've come across. It is truly an instant literary classic, and one which deserves ample awards for both itself and Drucker's beautiful, lyrical and haunting prose. Having enjoyed Drucker's exceptional musicianship as a violinist with the superb Emerson String Quartet, I look forward to enjoying too his excellent literary talents well into the future.
Average customer rating:
- Power and Survival Played Out in Two People's Lives
- Harlequinized treatment of grim subject matter
- Powerful and mesmerizing
- the kommandant's mistress
- A fascinating, wrenching and daring novel.
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The Kommandant's Mistress: A Novel
Sherri Szeman
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0060170115 |
Book Description
The Kommandant's Mistress is a mesmerizing and disturbing depiction of sexual obsession and subjugation in a Nazi concentration camp.Szeman hauntingly constructs a kommandant's tiny office where a beautiful young Jewish woman must learn to survive the horrors of her daily servitude.Privy to every secret in the kommandant's heart and life, the woman bears witness to the grotesque reality of the camps, with no choice but to memorize the intimate details of a man fighting a tortured existence of his own.
Customer Reviews:
Power and Survival Played Out in Two People's Lives.......2006-02-04
The Kommandant's Mistress is not a novel for everyone. The setting is an Auschwitz-like Concentration Camp, and the topic is not love, but power and survival. Yet inside this hellish environment, Sherri Szeman wonderfully depicts two people who use each other for survival and whose humanity peaks out from behind their grim roles.
The novel is divided into his story, followed by her story, ending with an obituary-like objective statement of the facts of their lives. Told in a stream of consciousness style that is freed from the constraints of time, the novel is in story fragments from disjointed periods of the characters' lives. The different pieces are hinged together with transition words, phrases, or concepts that strengthen the stream of consciousness feeling.
The author is at her best depicting the lies each person tells themselves to hide from the truth. Both her characters are poets who life has put in a place of unspeakable horror. They are drawn to each other out of survival and, by comparing their stories, the reader is shown how each has twisted the truth to live.
The book ends with an Author's Note that lists a three page bibliography of sources used in the writing. A difficult, but ultimately rewarding and original first novel that is firmly based in the historic period. Szeman succeeds in bringing both characters to life and giving them a voice.
Harlequinized treatment of grim subject matter.......2003-03-28
This, a tale of a Nazi concentration camp commandant and his sexual subjugation of a Jewish inmate, is ultimately nothing more than a cliched romance novel masquerading as middle-brow literature. All the Harlequin cliches are here; Rachel, the Jewish inmate, is not just passably good-looking, she is, as the "official" biography at the end tells us, "a renowned beauty", and her captor is similarly "exceedingly physically attractive". Well, naturally, because there wouldn't be as much melodramatic potential if they were exceedingly non-remarkable individuals, and while one could argue that it was because of her looks that the commandant grew infatuated with her, it still seems to me a little too stock-in-trade when it comes to the stereotypes of cheesy romance novels.
Written in two first person narratives with biographical sketches at the end, the structure is jarring and provides no momentum to the plot, nor any depth to the characters; the reader is ultimately left with many pieces of the puzzle but no key as to how to put them together. Truth be told I haven't read a stylistic mishmash like this with the Holocaust as subject matter since DM Thomas' "White Hotel".
In turns cliched, clumsily written and over-wrought, I'd recommend giving this one a miss. Liliana Cavani did this first and better with her film "The Night Porter", a far more convincing and original portrayal of sexual obsession between a Nazi officer and Jewish concentration camp inmate; I'd also recommend Ka-Tzetnik's novels "House of Dolls" and "Atrocity" for a more viscerally realistic and harrowing view of sex as an instrument of survival during this insane and dark period of history.
Powerful and mesmerizing.......2002-04-09
This is one of the best books I have read. Its structure is remarkable. Think of James Joyce and his stream of consciencousness style but in complete sentences and easy to understand. We get the interior monologues of the major characters as though they are remembering the past, jumping from memory to memory.
The book is a powerful depiction of an unreal time. The marvel of this book is that the Kommandant is not portrayed as all bad and the Mistress is not all victim or all good.
Cool language is the medium for the most distrubing events. It is the substance of what is being said that carries the power, not the use or overuse of bombastic verbage that so often writers use to show us how great their talent is. This book says more with less.
In the end it is the most haunting of books.
the kommandant's mistress.......2001-01-21
As a student of the Holocaust, an interviewer of Holocaust survivors, and a writer/ professor of Holocaust fiction, I cannot recommend Ms. Szeman's book highly enough. Her research is meticulous and the breadth of imagination she uses to flesh out the historical detail for her readers is staggering. Also admirable is the stark prose with which she delineates the most horrific of experiences--perhaps the only way a tale of this sort can be told. And her depiction of von Walther, the Kommandant, is immensely compelling psychological portraiture. ...The kalidoscopic method of narration--juxtaposing and splicing the characters' experiences together in a series of snapshots--has been mentioned by other reviewers; I think it's one of the book's strengths and would be delighted to engage in a dialogue with Ms. Szeman or any of her students as to how/ why she chose this paricular method. I can be contacted at Jenna92@aol.com In any case, for any serious student of writing and/ or the Holocaust, this book is a must.
A fascinating, wrenching and daring novel........2001-01-19
Sherri Szeman, in her novel, "The Kommandant's Mistress," takes one risk after another. She dares to play with time and setting, generally changing scenes and characters in the middle of a page, so that the reader must scramble to keep his bearings. The Kommandant of the title, Max von Walther, professes to despise Jews, and he kills them without compunction. Yet, he boldly takes a beautiful Jewish deportee into his office and his life, in spite of the protests of his furious wife. Szeman tells her story from various points of view, first from the viewpoint of the Kommandant, then from the viewpoint of his mistress, and finally from the "official viewpoint". Another daring move is Szeman's presentation of often horrifying events without much embellishment. She depicts the situtations as a series of snapshots, one after another, quickly and relentlessly. For example, Szeman depicts the Kommandant's daughter, Ilse, repeating the vicious Jew-hating comments that she hears from her elders, each word coming out like a horrible profanity from the mouth of an innocent child. In another scene, the Kommandant implores his mistress to take his gun and help him to commit suicide. Will she pull the trigger? The effect of this staccato narrative style is similar to a punch in the stomach. It is traumatizing to contemplate constantly changing scenarios of deportations, physical and mental torture, and murder. Szeman seems to be saying that there is no way to tell such a story in a linear way. Only by being cryptic and non-linear can one begin to capture the emotional trauma of events that are not within the scope of most people's experience. Szeman is a poet, as well as a novelist, and her novel at times approaches poetry in its tremendous emotional impact. I highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in Holocaust literature that is challenging and thought-provoking.
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