European History : I Escaped From Auschwitz
Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz | 
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- ISBN13: 9781569802328
- Condition: New
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 An Important Document of History
Originally, I found this book while brousing in a local north of NYC suburb library when I was 13 years old under its original title about 42 years ago. While reading it at the time, I asked my father if this all really happened. He said that it had. And, that basically was it. There were family secrets at the time that I did not understand or know about.
This book had a tremendous immediate impact on me as an 8th grader in a Catholic school that I will never forget. All this was way long before I knew of the historical impact on me personally. When I first read Vrba's book, it was just so very shocking to know human beings could be capable of doing so much harm to other human beings. Decades have passed. Only in the last several years, did I become aware that family members on my father's side were lost at Auschwitz. A memorial in France incudes my great grandparents' names.
I Cannot Forgive
I read this book 30 years ago in the form of a tattered used paperback entitled "I Cannot Forgive". The stories of tragedy and horror told by Rudolf Vrba left me deeply shaken. I recall having to stop reading many times because my vision was obscured by tears. This book has never left my mind. It is with some trepidation that I am about to re-read this new edition. I know that it means I will be re-entering the violent and twisted world of Auschwitz, where so many innocent lives were so senselessly destroyed. It means I will have to re-witness so many acts of cruelty and barbarity through the eyes of the author as a teen-ager trapped in a death camp. I guess it is just a small way of trying to keep alive the memory of the vanished millions....
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This man at 17 years old made an effort to inform the world of what he witnessed in Auschwitz. His courage is overwhelming. The book itself is a page turner, i could hardly put it down. The events it describes are still inconceivable; his actions, beyond impressive.
There is an excellent PBS special on this event. Go to www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/escape-from-auschwitz/vrbas-and-wetzlers-escape
The events are inconceivable.
Extraordinary testimony
Rudolf Vrba (pronounced Verba), Slovak Jewish 17 years, is deported in 1942 to Maïdanek then, quickly, Auschwitz and Birkenau. The exceptional strength of character, combined with a sense of humour extraordinary luck, fidelity in friendship, will enable it to survive until his escape from Auschwitz in April 1944. The motivation for his escape (one of the very few who have succeeded) was to save Hungarian Jews from the terrible mass deportation ahead.
The disbelief was the first rendezvous of his report, his contacts, both the secret of Auschwitz was meticulously kept, as the Great Lie operating at full. It is necessary to recall that ever the official version and therefore mediated in the peoples occupied by the Nazis for deportation meant extermination. Poland is understood faster than other countries. We know why and how history took place (including the Warsaw ghetto). Extreme poverty and weakness of humanity, Dr. Rudolf Kastner, head of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Hungary, preferred to communicate Vrba's report on the atrocities of the extermination camps (and very precise quantification of 1,765,000 killed, Eichmann rather than alerting the Jewish community so that it will revolt. In exchange, Kastner - the book teaches us - got saved his life, his family and all, that of 1,684 Jews. 400,000 were deported. The remarkable intervention of the apostolic nuncio (= pope's ambassador in Slovakia) who believed the truth of the report Vrba after having heard at length, Pope Pius XII (we are well aware of the controversy about it) and the Apostolic Nuncio in Hungary permit to stop the deportation of 800,000 other Jews.
The quality of work is exceptional. The gift of humor is sublime. Rudolf Vrba manages to show the stupidity of executioners, their stupidity mechanical, projects a beam of light on the banality of evil and makes us laugh in many pages. Laughs in misery, death, despair, but never despair. Laugh as knows so well do so in a Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago about Soviet concentration camps.
Never lose faith in humanity: Rudolf Vrba never ceases to surprise us. In the extermination camps, vermin encountered the nobility of soul, common law prisoners were killers, some kapos were real men, there was even a SS who was disgusted escape 2 Jews, is a long list of a tragic hero and low humanity who perished, often to defend it. Tribute is their record.
Thank you Mr Rudolf Vrba for this extraordinary testimony.
A Page Turned and an Eye Opener
This book is a page turner from the moment you start reading. It is not as complex as the book written by Alfred Wexler that was recently translated into English. It is written from the perspective of an adolescent man. Youth and inexperience is likely what helped Mr. Vrba survive and deal with the atrocities that surrounded him: young people simply believe that they will live and maintain hope far longer than those with experience about the human condition. Plus, he had a good deal of luck, which he does not discuss but comes through. I often found myself wondering how he could remember such detail and quotes, but by the end of the book I realized that while some of the details may be somewhat imprecise, the impression and the overall truth of the testimony was both powerful and unchallengeable. Also, I was shocked at the overall readability of the prose on matters so morbid. The book sounded like it came from an optimist on life or a person so proud of his accomplishment of saving so many that nothing could mar his implacability. The one note of negativism was Mr. Vrba's attack on the Zionists. Here he was clearly enraged at the Hungarian Jewish leadership (See Zionist organization Arcvhives). Indeed the original title of this work was I can not forgive. Did he mean forgive both the Germans and their Jewish collaborators or just the former?
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