Book Description
Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world–only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time–was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946.
Jan Gross’s Fear attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation?
Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war’s aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder–and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach.
Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize—winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Poland’s Communist rulers fulfilled the dream of Polish nationalists by bringing into existence an ethnically pure state.
For more than half a century, what happened to the Jewish Holocaust survivors in Poland has been cloaked in guilt and shame. Writing with passion, brilliance, and fierce clarity, Jan T. Gross at last brings the truth to light.
Praise for Fear
“You read [Fear] breathlessly, all human reason telling you it can’t be so–and the book culminates in so keen a shock that even a student of the Jewish tragedy during World War II cannot fail to feel it.”–Elie Wiesel, The Washington Post Book World
“Bone-chilling . . . [Fear] is illuminating and searing, a moral indictment delivered with cool, lawyerly efficiency that pounds away at the conscience with the sledgehammer of a verdict. . . . Fear takes on an entire nation, forever depriving Poland of any false claims to the smug, easy virtue of an innocent bystander to Nazi atrocities. . . . Gross’ Fear should inspire a national reflection on why there are scarcely any Jews left in Poland. It’s never too late to mourn. The soul of the country depends on it.”–Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Provocative . . . powerful and necessary . . . One can only hope that this important book will make a difference.”–Susan Rubin Suleiman, Boston Globe
“Imaginative, urgent, and unorthodox . . . The ‘fear’ of Mr. Gross’s title . . . is not just the fear suffered by Jews in a Poland that wished they had never come back alive. It is also the fear of the Poles themselves, who saw in those survivors a reminder of their own wartime crimes. Even beyond Mr. Gross’s exemplary historical research and analysis, it is this lesson that makes Fear such an important book.”–The New York Sun
“After all the millions dead, after the Nazi terror, a good many Poles still found it acceptable to hate the Jews among them. . . . The sorrows of history multiply: a necessary book.”
–Kirkus (starred review)
“Gross illustrates with eloquence and shocking detail that the bloodletting did not cease when the war ended. . . . This is a masterful work that sheds necessary light on a tragic and often-ignored aspect of postwar history.”–Booklist (starred review)
“[Fear] tells a wartime horror story that should forces Poles to confront an untold–and profoundly terrifying–aspect of their history.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Customer Reviews:
Compare "Fear" With An Earlier Book By Gross.......2007-08-22
The invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia in September of 1939 was an unprovoked partition of the country. It is understood that the Poles were not pleased by the Russian occupation, but it may be thought that the Russian occupation was a minor annoyance compared to the occupation by the Germans. In an earlier book Revolution from Abroad written in his pre-postmodern days, when Gross was an associate professor at Emory, Gross carefully and with excellent documentation shows how wrong this notion was. He wrote (Revolution from Abroad, Princeton Univ. Press, 1st ed., p. 229):
"These very conservative estimates show that the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction. This comparison holds for the first two years of the Second World War, the period before the Nazis began systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population."
Gross shows that, for Polish Catholics, the Soviets were even worse, indeed much worse than the brutal Nazis. Essentially all the Polish professional and semiprofessional classes (doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, managers, foremen, farmers with holding beyond a few acres, etc.) were rounded up by the Soviets and then either killed immediately or retained in prisons for shipments to slave labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. Prison conditions were hellish, worse than those in the Nazi concentration camps. Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 161): "In Lwów, twenty-eight people living in a 11.5 sq. m cell relied on the geometrical skills of a gifted high school student who fitted them most ingeniously by size into an intricate pattern." Sanitary conditions were appalling, with inmates frequently forced to urinate and defecate on the floors of the cells.
What was the situation with the Jews in the lands occupied by the Soviets and what was their attitude to the occupiers? Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 32):
"What Poles and Ukrainians report, often with biting irony, the Jews do not deny: 'Jews greeted the Soviet army with joy. The youth was spending days and evenings with the soldiers. . . Jews received incoming Russians enthusiastically, they [the Russians] also trusted them [the Jews].'"
Again, Gross writes (Revolution from Abroad, p. 34, quoting Celina Koninska):
"It is hard to find words to describe the feeling -- this waiting and this happiness. We wondered how to express ourselves -- to throw flowers? To sing? To organize a demonstration? How to show our great joy? I think the Jews awaiting the Messiah will feel, when he finally comes, the way we felt. "
These warm receptions by Jews for the Soviets in eastern Poland were in September of 1939, when there were no Germans in sight. The Jews were rejoicing over the occupation of eastern Poland by the Russians. To Polish Catholics, this was simply treason, analogous to the occasional warm receptions in western Poland of the Germans by some Volksdeutsche.
Now, it is undeniable that in the German-occupied portion of Poland where the situation of the Jews was worse than that of the Catholics, many Polish families hid Jews from the Nazi occupiers. It is a matter of record that Poles are listed at Yad Vashem numerically first amongst the righteous Gentiles for risking their lives and those of their families for sheltering Jews from the Nazis. So, it is fair to ask the question, "When did Jews use their favored position in Soviet occupied eastern Poland to shelter Polish Catholics from the NKVD?" This reviewer regrets to say that he cannot find any instances of such assistance.
Up to the day (June 22, 1941) when Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, Gross (Revolution from Abroad p. 194) estimates that 1.25 million people were transported into the Soviet Union from eastern Poland. The ghastly NKVD prisons in Poland were generally used as holding cells for Poles awaiting execution or prison train space for transportation to the gulags. When the Germans attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed or moved to the east 150,000 prisoners from these holding cells. In the Brygidki prison in Lwów, on June 22, 1941, the NKVD killed almost all of the 13,000 inmates. (Revolution from Abroad, p. 179). This was recorded by Gross as a "massacre" rather than a pogrom.
After the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, they encouraged anti-Semitic acts by the Poles, including pogroms. The Germans had only the most minimal success. Polish Catholics were not inclined to participate in Nazi murders. Moreover, the Polish underground punished betrayal of Jews to the Nazis by death. In Fear, Gross eschews the careful data based arguments he gave in his earlier book Revolution from Abroad. What is substituted is the kind of postmodern sermonizing that appeals to Gross's anti-Polish, anti-Catholic choir.
FEAR:ANTI-SEMITISM IN "SWEDEN" AFTER AUSCHWITZ...YES.......2007-08-03
A little known fact is that Sweden, upon their four year invasion (1655-1658) and brutal occupation of Poland, had brought with them their cultural tendencies and indoctrinated them on the Poles. One doctrine that dominated the Swedish invasion, of Poland, was the SWEDES RAMPANT AND OBSSESIVE MISSION TO FOSTER/SPREAD "ANTI-SEMITISM." Going from the 17th century to the 20th, when boat loads of Jews, who were fortunate to escape the misery of war-ravaged europe,(unlike the Poles and countless Europeans who would continue to suffer horribly, "AFTER 'THEIR' HOLOCAUST,you know "THE OTHERS," under Stalin), headed to Sweden, the Swedish Government pushed these boats back, sending the Jewish holocaust survivors away. The Swedes did not want them either. The English did the same, and the rest is history. The Jews were basically thrown out of every country in Europe(WHY?!). Why did all the jews end up in Poland? Here's why: because, unlike "all" the other countries, Poland was not murdering robbing and deporting them. The Jewish word in Europe was: "Poland is welcoming the jews, we are not persecuted there 'Come to Poland!'" And the Jews came and lived in harmony for centuries. The sad truth is that, anti-semitism, for whatever reason is, sadly, in practically every country. The 64K question is: "WHY IS THERE SO MUCH ANTI-SEMITISM WHEREVER JEWS SETTLE???? Anyone who knows anything about WWII, knows that, if not for the Jewish holocaust, simultaneous with Polish-Catholic Holocaust, the Polish nation would be, as they should be, portrayed as the greatest sufferers/victims of world wars. Come on people, Poland is between Germay and Russia, Hitler and Stalin. What an unfair and vicious psychological flip Mr. gross does in his book to villify a 2 century tormented Poland,i.e., encouraging anti-Polish hate, instead of telling a true story, with some objectivity, where Poland could easily be seen as 'greatest victims, equal victims, vivtims!; fostering, overdue, Pro-Polish deserved sympathy). Mr. gross chose the path of HATE. It's easier. This gross book only stirs up the old cauldren of hate. This hate book by gross, gives every "bigot," just what their looking for: a fabricated reason to really hate; any reason will do.. One must read JAN KARSKI: A SECRET STATE. KARSKI wrote this during the war and is very objective, and tells the "real story." Gross tells, his version, of the story almost 60 years later. This book is filled with sensationalisms coated with bitterness and an awful hatred. Jan Karski "WAS THERE!" Stories closer to real history are fresh and remembered more acurately, as oppossed to hateful/hurtful embellished quasi-novels like Gross'. My Goodness, no nation suffered like Poland. Gross' book only reminds people to make sure to "continue to hate, hate and hate some more. This does no one any good, especially in our worlds present uncertain state. What really is sad is that the COMMUNIST AUTHORITIES WERE ABLE TO, AGAIN, BLAME POLAND FOR "THEIR DIRTY WORK." Those of you who have read this book, are suffering needlessly because of Mr gross' embellishments and "over-the-top" sensationalisms. Even the pogrom photos are said to be doctored photos from a pogrom by the Lituanian police beating jews in the street, of course, up in Lithuania. For peace between Jews and Non-jews(ALL SUFFERED UNDER GERMANS) and understanding, settle down and read Jan Karski: A Secret State. Mr. Karski, unlike mr. Gross, wrote to fill the world with better understanding, and to inform the world. Everyone, must get this undisputed fact through their heads!: NO MATTER WHAT "ALL THE OTHER NATIONS IN EUROPE DID(including the viscious/brutal Danish SS, the Norwegian S.S.; Vichy France(#2), and the #1 anti-semitic country: ROMANIA, with the Jewish butchering "IRON GUARD."(look into it, read michael Marrus Holocaust in history). THE "GERMANS, AND "ONLY" THE GERMANS DECIDED TO KILL EVERY JEW IN THIS WORLD, AND ACTUALLY HAD THE NATION PUT THEIR "HEART,AND SOUL" INTO TRYING TO ACHIEVE IT. The Germans, as we all know, murdered and burned 6,000,000 Jews., and 3,000,000 Polish-Catholics. May they "all" rest in peace. Write books and live to make the world better, not gross. Don't waste your time or money, on this book. I've discussed this book with Polish and Jewish friends. We all agreed that it served no purpose, but to upset all of us. Look for truth, and you'll feel happier: READ KARSKI.
Noble Effort; Should Be Read, and Understood, In Full.......2007-07-25
In reviewing Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz," one must consider two phenomena: the book itself, and exploitations of it.
The book "Fear" is excellent. The subject matter, anti-Semitism in Poland after the Holocaust, is of vital interest to any adult human with a conscience. The central portion of the book addresses the 1946 Kielce pogrom. Holocaust survivors were murdered, including being slowly stoned to death, on the basis of blood libel. This eruption boggles the mind; as part of understanding what one is as a human being, one wants to plumb this event. Thus, though aghast and sobbing, the reader can't help but continue to turn the pages until a conclusion is reached.
Gross' prose is elegant. His authorial presence is never intrusive, and yet the reader feels as if in the hands of a world-class expert with an encyclopedic command of even the most minuscule of pertinent historical facts. At times Gross' self-restraint weakens, and he makes a cutting comment, and those moments, rare as they are, merely enhance the reader's experience. You want to know that this powerful mind was driven to anguish by these facts, just as you are.
Gross struggles to be evenhanded. In fact, he is the author of previous books that depict Polish victimization under Nazi and Communist invasion ("Revolution from Abroad"; "Polish Society under German Occupation.") He opens "Fear" with a snapshot of the disaster that was WW II for Poland. In short, he wants us to know that human beings don't commit atrocities in a vacuum.
Though I greatly admired this book, there are some shortcomings.
Gross appears to state that he is the first to argue that Poles experience guilt over having taken over property vacated by Jewish Holocaust victims, and that this guilt exacerbated post-war Polish anti-Semitism. But Steinlauf said as much almost a decade previously, in 1997's "Bondage to the Dead," and Polish authors have said as much in less-read publications. Steinlauf also successfully harnessed Robert Jay Lifton's theories; Gross should have engaged this, and at least mentioned cultural reflections like the Czechoslovak film, "Shop on Main Street."
Gross should have at least mentioned Edna Bonacich's "Middleman Minority" theory. Thomas Sowell has recently written on the, to outsiders, inexplicable atrocities that have been inflicted on Middleman Minorities in places as distant from Poland as Southeast Asia.
The Kielce pogrom was sparked by blood libel. Blood libel is so absurd that readers may come to regard Poles as a lesser species. Gross himself, as utterly masterful as he is in his command of historical personages and events, is adrift when discussing folklore. He does not even cite, for example, Alan Dundes' basic work, though Gross' theory is similar to Dundes. Gross never uses the Freudian term "projective inversion," but, like Dundes, that is his understanding.
In fact, the Middleman Minority theory sheds some light on this item of ugly folklore, to a reader, unlike Gross, familiar with the study of folklore. Regard organ theft legends in the Third World today. Villagers insist that Americans are stealing children's organs for transplants. In 1994, June Weinstock, an Alaskan environmentalist, was beaten with sticks until thought dead by Maya Indians in Guatemala. A boy had wondered off; Guatemalans convinced themselves that the Gringo tourist had stolen his organs. This absurd legend is believed because it encapsulates the people's feeling of economic exploitation.
This understanding does not excuse anti-Semitism -- nothing does -- in fact, the very best Poles have always owned up to the anti-Semitism in their country, and given their lives to fight it. But unless a real attempt is made to understand why destructive folklore has currency, we can't help prevent atrocities.
The reception of "Fear" by the media, community leaders and readers here is disconnected from the book. Sadly, many readers have used this book, itself a courageous protest against hate, exactly as a carte blanche justifying their own hatred. While Gross struggles for fairness and conscience, too many exploiters of "Fear" struggle to make it say something it never says, i.e., "I have been telling you all along; those Polaks? They are animals."
Two misconceptions stand out. One is the insistence that a Polish national essence is responsible for the crime at Kielce. Gross himself attempts to fend off this kind of essentializing with his opening quote about the genocide in Rwanda. Events like these have happened before, far distant from Poland; they will happen again. We must develop a cross-cultural paradigm for understanding, one that is not hostage to the accumulation of chips in an ethnic grudge match.
The other misconception is the insistence that Gross alone has "forced" Poles from their "denial." Again, in this understanding, Poles are essentially incapable of conscience, and require a Jewish author to be pilloried for their crimes. This stereotype is all the more believable because many readers are unfamiliar with Poland, and don't speak Polish.
First, Warsaw-born Gross is as Polish as any Catholic. In any case, even if one rejects his identity on the racist grounds that a Jew can't also be a Pole, non-Jewish Poles, as well as Jewish ones, have been writing about Polish guilt for Polish crimes against Jews. Steinlauf's "Bondage to the Dead" offers a good summary of works by authors like Jan Blonski, Jerzy Ficowski, and Czeslaw Milosz. Many of these writings have not made a splash in the West in the way that Gross' have, but they have ignited self-examination in Poland. Gross quotes one of these works at length: Marcel Lozinski's 1988 film "Witnesses."
The publication of Jan Tomasz Gross' "Fear" is a victorious shedding of light on a very dark time. Its victory will be complete when readers can accept it for what it actually says, rather than what they want it to say, and exercise, for themselves, the very same courage, integrity and compassion that Gross therein exemplifies.
Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.......2007-03-16
A good insight into the attitudes of indigenous populations in Europe in
regards to anti-semitism. It gives a good perspective as to why the Germans set up the death camps in the eastern part of Poland and why so few Jews who escaped the camps and ghettoes were able to last out the war.
Outstanding.......2007-03-12
people should understand that poland after thw war was very anti-semitic. The first revewer is completly ignoring the facts and the truth. The book is a wonderful analysis of the issue.
Book Description
A poignant, powerful distillation of the Holocaust experience from the internationally acclaimed writer and Nobel laureate.
In his first book, Night, Elie Wiesel described his concentration camp experience, but he has rarely written directly about the Holocaust since then. Now, as the last generation of survivors is passing and a new generation must be introduced to mankind’s darkest hour, Wiesel sums up the most important aspects of Hitler’s years in power and provides a fitting memorial to those who suffered and perished. He writes about the creation of the Third Reich, Western acquiescence, the gas chambers, and memory. He criticizes Churchill and Roosevelt for what they knew and ignored, and he praises little-known Jewish heroes. Augmenting Wiesel’s text are testimonies from survivors, who recall, among other moments and events: the establishment of the Nurembourg Laws, Kristallnacht, transport to the camps, and liberation.
With this book — richly illustrated with 45 photographs from the U.S. Holocaust
Museum -- Wiesel proves once again the ineluctable importance of bearing witness.
Customer Reviews:
after the darkness.......2007-02-16
I believe this book is a wonderful introduction to the history and events leading up to, and including the horrible years of the holocaust. I gave it to my grandaughter who is ten years old. I am a child of a survivor. The book is a valuable part of education of a time that now seems so distant, and when most of the survivors have died. It speaks for them to future generations
nd as always, Elie Wiesel is warm, and honest, but never bitter. We are now the witnesses for those who experienced hell.
Yes of course, ""Reflection on the Holocaust""!!!.......2006-10-10
Those who do not believe that there was, and still is, a legend in the name of 'Holocaust' are kindly invited to visit Ghaza and Lebanon (North and notably South) to look and see how such a word is actually pronounced.
They will see a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life through a carnage of fire and cold-blood slaughter of civilians.
Thank you.
Powerful, Haunting.......2006-09-07
Dare to stick you head and heart into the cruelity of mankind and you come away from this powerful book enlightened--and looking over your shoulder at today's racism. An equally moving book is Walking the Trail, One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Jerry Ellis.
Excellent Book.......2006-06-22
This is the third book I read by Elie Wiesel, first I read "Night" which is my favorite, second I read "The Forgotten" which I thought was very good too. Now this one, is much shorter but the tetimonials by other Holocaust victims and the photographs makes it an excellent book. The generation of WWII survivors are dying and we need books like these to keep reminding us and future generations of the horrors of the war, so we don't repeat it.
A short overview of history's greatest evil .......2005-05-04
Elie Wiesel is the writer who more than any other made the world aware of the Holocaust. He through the years has been a voice of remembrance for the victims, a voice of integrity and courage, a witness of what is the greatest example of Man's inhumanity to Man known in human history. For the Holocaust was the deliberate effort of Nazi Germany, a people sitting in the center of Europpean civilization to wholly destroy, man, woman and child the entire Jewish people. One third of the Jewish people was murdered in the years 1939-1945, and the greatest share of European Jewry destroyed.
Now in this work Elie Wiesel presents a small historical over-view of the Shoah, and accompanies this with testimonies of others who passed through this world of nightmare.
It is a short moving volume, another work of invaluable testimony.
Average customer rating:
- A daughter's discovery of her Jewish identity
- Lawyer who knew nothing about the Holocaust or War World II?
- "After Long Silence"
- A ploy to sell out her parents and tell the world she's homosexual.
- A second generation Holocaust memoir
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After Long Silence
Helen Fremont
Manufacturer: Delta
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ASIN: 0385333706
Release Date: 2000-01-11 |
Amazon.com
In her mid-30s Helen Fremont discovered that, although she had been raised in the Midwest as a Catholic, she was in fact the daughter of Polish Jews whose families had been exterminated in the Holocaust. Fremont's tender but unsparing memoir chronicles the voyage of discovery she took with her older sister, ferreting out information from Jewish organizations and individuals and worrying about its impact on their angry, overpowering father and reticent, nightmare-plagued mother. Fremont has the courage to paint a nearly unsympathetic portrait of her parents' secretiveness and initial reluctance to have their children dredge up the past; as the narrative unfolds, readers comprehend the tormented roots of their behavior without forgetting the psychological problems it created for their daughters. Fremont's re-creation of her parents' ghastly ordeals--her mother narrowly escaping the murder of nearly every Jew in her hometown; her father surviving six years in the Soviet gulag--is a triumph of dogged research and sympathetic imagination. Her book tells a deeply American story of identity lost and reclaimed, complete with Fremont coming out to her parents as a lesbian, yet it also achieves understanding of the dark European past and its icy grip on her family. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
"To this day, I don't even know what my mother's real name is."
Helen Fremont was raised as a Roman Catholic. It wasn't until she was an adult, practicing law in Boston, that she discovered her parents were Jewish--Holocaust survivors living invented lives. Not even their names were their own. In this powerful memoir, Helen Fremont delves into the secrets that held her family in a bond of silence for more than four decades, recounting with heartbreaking clarity a remarkable tale of survival, as vivid as fiction but with the resonance of truth.
Driven to uncover their roots, Fremont and her sister pieced together an astonishing story: of Siberian Gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives.
After Long Silence is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets.
What Fremont and her sister discover is an astonishing story: one of Siberian gulags and Italian royalty, of concentration camps and buried lives. AFTER LONG SILENCE is about the devastating price of hiding the truth; about families; about the steps we take, foolish or wise, to protect ourselves and our loved ones. No one who reads this book can be unmoved, or fail to understand the seductive, damaging power of secrets. -->
Customer Reviews:
A daughter's discovery of her Jewish identity.......2007-05-14
From today's perspective, it is difficult to comprehend just why a couple who survived the Holocaust would hide their Jewish identify from their daughters for years, insisting that they are Polish Catholic refugees in the USA. This memoir, however, explains how their fear of a repeat pogrom drives them to deny their heritage, keep secret their loss of religious identify, and assuage their horrific memories and guilt at surviving.Fremont and her sister's quest to discover the truth causes their parents much pain, but the author is clear that the family's pain had dominated their lives since birth.
Lawyer who knew nothing about the Holocaust or War World II? .......2006-04-11
I was very surprised to learn that Helen Fremont was able to become a lawyer and knew nothing about the Holocaust. What kind of education did she obtain? How was it possible that she wasn't interested in her parent's history? Even if they were Roman Catholics.
Book is full of historical errors (Warsaw was captured within hours, it was safer to be a Pole in the streets a Lvov during the German invasion)
It bothered me that the street names were Misspelled (Owacowa instead of Owocowa, Mariacki Platz insead of Plac Mariacki)
The story itself was very interesting. I wish however it was written by her parents.
"After Long Silence".......2006-01-07
This is one of my favorite books of all time. It is a real eye opener even after years of hearing, learning, and reading about the Holocaust. I plan to read it again.
A ploy to sell out her parents and tell the world she's homosexual........2005-08-01
This book was required reading my first year in college. It eneded up consuming the entire year in a depessing and dire atmosphere. Every class we talked about the book, it's themes, it's techniques.
Never once did anyone dare to say they disliked the story. How could you say you disliked a personal story about the Holocaust and the ending in which she relays to the entire world that she is homosexual. You couldn't voice an oppinion against this at the risk of being "A Nazi" or a "Homophobe".
I'm risking that to tell every person here that this story was terrible. It was about the author harassing her Holocaust surviving parents over and over again about their terrible ordeal. They wanted to have it in the past, over with, gone, and forgotten. The memories were too hard to dredge up and frankly they were none of their daughter's business. BUT the author Sherlock's the information and writes this book. She then said in the end that she was homosexual when this information had nothing to do with the story. The entire book was a way to "come out" with all the stress on her parents and none on herself.
This indeed was a sad story, but because of the desparate and self centered needs of the author. It's easy to have a best seller when you make your subject matter a taboo subject to disagree with.
Read it if you want and form your own opinions. This is just mine.
A second generation Holocaust memoir.......2005-06-21
After Long Silence by Helen Fremont is a second generation Holocaust memoir. The author's mother and aunt survived the Holocaust by disguising themselves as Polish Catholics in Italy. Her father escaped from Soviet Siberia and walked across Europe at the end of the war to join the sisters in Rome.
What makes this story so interesting is that, after the war the sisters never came out of hiding as Catholics and convinced the author's father to maintain the pretense as well. They migrated to the USA and had two daughters that they raised as Catholics. It is only when the daughters are in their 30s that they start to suspect that their parents are keeping something from them.
Helen Fremont blends together the two stories of her and her sister uncovering their parents Jewish past and their parents Holocaust survivor tale in a wonderful way that shows the intergenerational impact of lies and deception in a way that is still sensitive to her parents' desire to put the past behind them.
Book Description
Eugene Pogany's father and uncle, identical twins, were born in Hungary of Jewish parents but raised by them as devout Catholic converts until World War II unraveled their family. Miklos, the author's father, was sent to Bergen-Belsen, a hell that led him to denounce Christian passivity in the face of the Holocaust and return to the Judaism of his birth. Gyorgy, a Catholic priest, was sheltered from the war in an Italian monastery by the renowned and saintly friar Padre Pio. Their mother, also interned as a Jew, walked into the Auschwitz gas chamber holding a crucifix to her breast.
In My Brother's Image eloquently portrays how the Holocaust destroyed these brothers' close childhood bond. Each believing the other a traitor to their family's faith, they remained estranged even after emigrating to America, where they lived and worked only miles from each other. Filled with extraordinary scenes such as Miklos's Passover celebration with fellow prisoners in the camp, this tragic memoir encapsulates the drama of a family torn apart by the historical rupture between Jews and Catholics--even as it trains a wider, impartial lens on its causes and on the history of Hungary's Jews.
Customer Reviews:
In My Brothers Image.......2006-02-22
This Book is for everybody to read, it is very interesting and powerful
In My Brother's Image.......2005-04-22
The book, In My Brother's Image, was a book that caught my attention and made me want to keep reading. This book showed this very well. You learn about Gyuri and Miklos', identical twin brothers, life before the war when they were best friends, during the war how religion had torn them apart and the events leading to it, and after how different they had become. Miklos' son Eugene wrote the book, not Gyuri or Miklos. He vicariously wrote it and he makes it seem as though he were right there. The accounts in this book are based upon his father, uncle, aunt, and printed documents from the time such as newspapers and books.
I, personally, am very into the Holocaust and what happened to families before, during, and after the war so if you are too I definitely think you should consider this book. If you like to see how people can change on a general level this is a good book. If you are like me, liking to learn about the Holocaust or history for that matter, this is an excellent book. Those on grade level 10, 11, and 12 (and on) will be able to understand book because of the language and words used. So once again read this book.
I've met the author!.......2005-01-05
I remember reading about this real-life story a number of years before this book was actually published; I still have the clipped article from the Boston Globe in one of my scrapbooks. Then, when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Mr. Pogany came to our Hillel one Friday night and after services and dinner read from his book and spoke to us about the story behind it. Having met the author makes reading a book even better!
I've very interested in what befell Hungarian Jewry during WWII, possibly because it's so painful and haunting to realise that they were the last nation to be invaded by the Nazis, the final Jewish community in Europe still pretty much fully intact, but for the men who had been drafted into labour battalions or sent off to work camps several years earlier. It's an even more interesting and unique story because the family became Catholics shortly after WWI ended, and they were very devout, so much so that the author's uncle Gyuri eventually became a priest, and his father, Miklós, had seriously contemplated becoming one too. Because of a painful health condition, Gyuri got permission to recover his health in Italy, which was a stroke of luck, since he got out before things really began getting worse and worse, even before the arrival of the Nazis. Though the twins' mother was deported and murdered, the rest of the family did not live in the small town she did, and because they were in Budapest did not suffer the fate of the other Hungarian Jews in smaller towns and cities, who were packed into ghettos and then deported. The Budapest Ghetto wasn't erected until very late in the War, and when Miklós and his wife Muci (also a distant cousin of his) were finally deported, they were "only" taken to Bergen-Belsen as opposed to one of the death camps in Poland like the majority of their Hungarian co-religionists had been.
Because he was tucked away safely in Italy, a place which only lost about 19% of its prewar Jewish population, in the care of the holy mystic Padre Pio, Gyuri was not subject to anything like his twin brother and the rest of their family were. He could never understand why his beloved twin had lost faith in Catholicism and Christianity, how he could go back to Judaism, the religion they'd left as small boys and had never even really been very much of a part of in their early years before they all converted. Many people both then and now have made apologies for the collaboration, either active or through silent complicity, of ordinary citizens in allowing the Shoah to take place, much like Gyuri did, but Miklós and Muci had seen firsthand what had happened to them. Despite nearly thirty years of being a good Catholic, he was not protected from even the "good" labour brigade for converts. In the eyes of the Nazis and ordinary Hungarians, his family were still Jewish. The local parish priest arranged for their mother Gabriella to be taken from the ghetto to his church every day to hear Mass before she was deported, but he still didn't try to hide her or protect her from deportation. This book explores the complex relationship between not only the brothers who were separated by faith but also how the Church failed to protect its members, all members, and to speak out against what was going on, and how something of such a large scale could never have happened without the kind of hatred and collaboration from the common folk that the Poganies saw breaking through the surface after the Nazis and Hungarian fascists came to power.
Quick read, hits on many themes with us today........2004-03-17
I thought this was a good book and could not put it down. It explores the issues of assimilation among Budapest's Jews, conversion issues, Jewish and Catholic relations, Jesiwh security or lack thereof, Catholic complicity in the Holocaust and the Catholic church setting the stage for millenia that made the Holocaust possible. It also talks of family love and connectedness despite serious philosophical differences. We're discussing this in my book club and it should be very interesting.
A compelling book indeed.......2002-08-29
As the child of parents who came from the strictly Orthodox Jewish community of Hungary, and as one raised within that Orthodoxy, albeit transplanted to America, this book exposed me to a portion of Hungarian Jewish history I never really knew. This book speaks of the tragedy of so many Hungarian Jews. Jews who were totally estranged from their ancestral faith, who had no attachment to their heritage. For those people, Judaism was an undesirabe yoke to be cast aside or at best ignored. This book tells the reader however that one cannot truly escape his true identity. The true hero of the book, the author's father, discovers this in the hell of Bergen-Belsen. His uncle, the priest, spends the war in relative safety, but always in fear that he would be denounced. That uncle also has to contend with the very real possiblity that his Hungarian coreligionists "allowed" him to escape to Italy into the warm embrace of Padre Pio and the Capuchin monks not out of dedication to him in the spirit of Christian fellowship, but rather out of a desire to be rid of another Jew.
The emotions that pervade this book are powerful. The characters are real. The dialogue, while made up, displays the pathos of the characters and speaks to the reader's soul.
This book is about many things: religion, families and their dysfunctions, theodicy, Catholic-Jewish relations, and overding all of those, this book is about the complexity of life. Like all great works, the message of this book will be shaped by the reader and his/her weltanschaung.
Amazon.com
At Memory's Edge is an ambitious and provocative collection of essays with topics ranging from Art Spiegelman's Maus books to, most notably, the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Author James E. Young, an American professor of English and Judaic Studies, was the only foreigner and the only Jew on the committee that selected the design for the German memorial. His behind-the-scenes account of this project's development offers sophisticated answers to some very difficult questions. Young doggedly asks how Berlin can remember a group of people who are no longer at home there, and how Germany can--or should--remember the extermination of Jews once committed in that nation's name. The author's answers to such questions may appear excessively dogmatic to some readers. Early in the book, for example, Young asserts that "memory-work about the Holocaust cannot, must not, be redemptive in any fashion." But his rationale for such sweeping pronouncements is very persuasive. The book is also lavishly illustrated with photographs and architectural drawings that will be a great value to readers who accept the challenge that Young has assumed: "the task of contemplating how to understand a formative historical tragedy of which first-hand memory is rapidly fading." --Michael Joseph Gross
Book Description
How should Germany commemorate the mass murder of Jews once committed in its name? James E. Young-the only foreigner and the only Jew to serve on the German commission to select a design for a national Holocaust memorial-tells the inside story of this enormously controversial project. Young also inquires deeply into the moral and aesthetic questions surrounding artistic representations of the Holocaust produced by young artists who themselves did not experience it.
Book Description
This unique and profoundly moving memoir of life in the concentration camps and afterward was written by a French female resistance leader, a non-Jew who became an important literary figure in post-war France. Now available in English in its entirety for the first time, this book includes vignettes, poems, and prose poems that speak eloquently of horror, heroism, and conscience.
Customer Reviews:
If you read no other book on the Holocaust, read this one........2000-08-23
The other two reviews are so insightful and accurate, in my opinion, I should have little to add. Yet, after reading "Auschwitz and After", I felt I had to express something of how the book made me understand and grow. As a convert to Judaism (born in 1951, I was on the pathway my whole life, I realize now), I have read many, many books/memoirs/histories on the Holocaust. Many of them have been very moving, indeed, beginning with Anne Frank's Diary, on through to "Maus". Though I acknowledge that these words have been said before, I still believe that Charlotte Delbo's words put me into that Hell more than any other survivor's testimony to date. Delbo's words do more than say "this happened and that happened". They are poetry...yet how can poetry apply to any experience in a death camp? Surprisingly, scarily, the poetry transports the reader there more truly than any film, any historical analysis, even better than any well-written survivor account. At first I thought I would not like it; my sensibilities were offended that someone would write in poetic format about an experience at a death camp ("Maus" was different; it was a cartoon, yes, but drawn by the son of a survivor, not a survivor). After finishing Delbo's triology, I feel that her words (not all in poetic form) made me understand as much as anyone who did not experience a death camp, how it felt, how one survived, what one endured when one "came back" to the "real world".
Due to the passage of time, we are losing the remaining Holocaust survivors. Hence, Spielberg's and others' efforts to record the testimony before it is too late. There has been more attention lately paid to the children of the survivors' and how their parents' experiences affected their lives. Delbo's words transcend the words of one survivor - she really makes the reader understand what happned to those who "came back", how little they had to give, in some cases, to their spouses, to their children. American culture puts a lot of emphasis on "getting over, moving on". To some extent, I believe this is usually a healthy thing to try to do; but some experiences fall outside the realm of being able to "get over it". I would suggest that some experiences are so traumatic that one cannot "process" them and get over them. How is forgiveness possible when the entire world is affected as a result? Some experiences mark a person and maybe a culture permanently, and to deny or to try to repress this is unhealthy. At the end of their lives now, most published Holocaust testimonies report that the death camp experience "never leaves you" - something "survivors" probably didn't believe when they were first liberated. The fact that the Holocaust survivors are becoming fewer and fewer makes Delbo's book all the more important because it conveys the true horror, the true evil of human degradation and genocide - and explains why the Holocaust, as well as other genocides have and will reverberate from generation to generation. Her book made me realize that understanding and vigilance, not "processing" and forgiveness is the answer.
Delbo and the survivors.......2000-05-24
This book is a translation of the famous postwar trilogy of Charlotte Delbo, a French Resistance fighter who was caught and sent to Auschwitz, then transferred to Ravensbruck. She was, and is, quite well-known in France. Though she is now deceased, the translator, Rosette Lamont, knew Delbo personally and is the foremost expert on her work, having written a number of articles on Delbo. Another who has written sensitively about Delbo is Nathan Bracher. Like all translations, there is a little something lost in the English rendering. If you are able to read the French, the original titles are "Aucun de nous ne reviendra," "Une connaissance inutile," and "Mesure de nos jours." Other books by Delbo you might find interesting are "La Memoire et les Jours," and "Le convoi du 24 janvier." She also wrote a number of plays, and poetry that isn't in this trilogy.
Thanks to the work of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University, the Survivors of the Shoah project by Steven Spielberg, and the efforts of the new National Holocaust Museum, there is no shortage of testimony from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. But Jews were not the only victims of the Nazi regime, and there is surprisingly little testimony from non-Jewish survivors. Delbo is probably the only non-Jewish victim who became an important literary figure in the postwar era, and her position as victim along with her eloquent indictment of Christianity and Christian culture for their complicity in the extermination of the Jewish victims with whom she feels strong kinship and empathy make her work an absolutely unique contribution to post-Holocaust literature. Feel free to e-mail me at schnaibl@fas.harvard.edu for more bibliographical references.
Amazing account.......1999-08-19
I have never read a book on the topic of the Holocaust that grasped it quite as well as this one has. Other books make the Holocaust sound 'too good' compared to her stories and accounts that are portrayed in this book. If you want to get a real grasp or feel of the Holocaust experience in a poetic and creatively written path, then this is a book you should read. Also, for anybody interested in the Holocaust, this is a definite must. It is basically as true and real as an account on the Holocaust can possibly get. It is simply an amazing piece of work.
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After the Holocaust
Michael Brenner
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0691006792 |
Book Description
This landmark book is the first comprehensive account of the lives of the Jews who remained in Germany immediately following the war. Gathering never-before-published eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, Michael Brenner presents a remarkable history of this period. While much has been written on the Holocaust itself, until now little has been known about the fate of those survivors who remained in Germany. Jews emerging from concentration camps would learn that most of their families had been murdered and their communities destroyed. Furthermore, all Jews in the country would face the stigma of living, as a 1948 resolution of the World Jewish Congress termed it, on "bloodsoaked German soil." Brenner brings to life the psychological, spiritual, and material obstacles they surmounted as they rebuilt their lives in Germany. At the heart of his narrative is a series of fifteen interviews Brenner conducted with some of the most important witnesses who played an active role in the reconstruction--including presidents of Jewish communities, rabbis, and journalists.
Based on the Yiddish and German press and unpublished archival material, the first part of this book provides a historical introduction to this fascinating topic. Here the author analyzes such diverse aspects as liberation from concentration camps, cultural and religious life among the Jewish Displaced Persons, antisemitism and philosemitism in post-war Germany, and the complex relationship between East European and German Jews. A second part consists of the fifteen interviews, conducted by Brenner, with witnesses representing the diverse background of the postwar Jewish community. While most of them were camp survivors, others returned from exile or came to Germany as soldiers of the Jewish Brigade or with international Jewish aid organizations. A third part, which covers the development of the Jewish community in Germany from the 1950s until today, concludes the book.
Book Description
From the tropics to the Artic Poles (and everywhere in between), seventeen epic tales of survival.
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Impossible to Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After (Art Catalogue)
Pierre Borhan , and
Clement Cheroux
Manufacturer: Nazraeli Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Kenna, Michael
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ASIN: 159005010X |
Customer Reviews:
Readable.......2002-01-18
Highly spiritual and respectful of the reader, the text is grave without being pompous. Philosophy without a doubt,nevertheless extremely readable. I recommend it for anybody in search of the meanders of soul and mind, never one without the other.
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