Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Book review
For my book review i read the memoir, Alicia: My Story, by Alicia Applebaum-Jurman. She was the only one to survive the Holocaust in her family and the book (being VERY long) tells every detail of her accounts from the beginning to the end. Alicia first lost her oldest brother, then her father, 3 other brothers one by one, and finally her mother; who she watched personally be shot by a firing squad. The thing that struck me most in the novel was how she described the slow Nazi arrival in her town. She described it as being very slow, and that the soldiers were very kind to her and her community. They bought things from the shops, mingled with people, and seemed very generous. It was after almost 2 months before they adruptly started to kill and take people away. I had never had this perspective before; i had just assumed that the Nazis immediately came in and started to slaughter the Jews, but apparently this wasn't so.
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Thats how it all started. The Germans showed little signs of hostility from the Jews until much later when they severely restricted their rights and then they began to take Jews away. By the Way nice background:)
ReplyDeleteGreat reflection. That sounds awful- I can't imagine going forward in life after witnessing those horrible atrocities. When I went to a concentration camp two summers ago, I saw the place where they used to line up the victims for the firing squads at Terezin- hard to think about now having seen that.
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