Review: Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo

4 stars for Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo.

Auschwitz and After is a finely translated masterpiece that encompasses three volumes - Volume I None of Us will Return, Volume II Useless Knowledge and Volume III The Measure of Our Days. The entire book holds within itself one of the saddest accounts of living and breathing in the concentration camp in the history of mankind, and yet, the unique blend of prose and poetry gives a lyrical feeling of poignancy that stretches from sadness to beauty.

The book tells of the price the women from the French Resistance paid for their daring contributions in World War II. Of the 230 women sent to Auschwitz in January 1943, only 49 returned. Besides the daily struggle to stay alive in the concentration camp besieged by hunger, thirst, fatigue, abuse and despair, these women have to contend with debilitating diseases such typhus and dysentery that come about due to terrible living conditions. To survive against the odds, these women form groups and avoid being separated from one's group. The temptation to give up is high when one is alone, but when surrounded by others, one is able to endure and dare to hope. Members of the same group give support and take care of one another. However, there are still those who stop believing they will return home and these women are as good as dead. To stay alive, one has to make plans about going home. Hope keeps one alive.

After Auschwitz, those who survived continue to struggle. These survivors, yes, they return, they live and they are alive. Everything about them is the same, yet nothing is. Because nothing will ever be the same within those who survived Auschwitz for they carry the weight of the dead in their arms, in their heart and in their memories. These survivors, though liberated from their captors, are imprisoned by their memories of the dead. They find it difficult to talk to the living. And having conversed with death, they find everything pointless and grapple with the meaning of living. Through the author, we learn that surviving and returning is not the end. In fact, it is the beginning to living again. No one survives Auschwitz and returns unscathed. For those who return, it is a must to learn to endure their horrid past and adjust to living anew, otherwise they cannot move on.

This trilogy of a book is written for us to learn from the past so that history will not repeat itself ever again. Reading this book makes me appreciate even more for being born and living in a part of the world where there is peace and harmony.

Review: Night (Night Trilogy #1) by Elie Wiesel

5 stars for Night (Night Trilogy book 1) by Elie Wiesel.

I have always thought Night is a non fiction, a wartime memoir written by Elie Wiesel, that is until I search the genre for this book as confirmation for purpose of labelling my review. Some sites list it as a novel while Wikipedia says "it remains unclear how much of Night is memoir". It seems strange to me that there can be much controversy as to whether Night is fiction or non fiction. After all, the author himself said in interviews that the book is factual and is never portrayed as a novel. Yet some scholars who studied holocaust memoirs have raised questions about how much of the book can be verified.

Well, in any case, both Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com have made changes to certify Night as non fiction (way back in 2006). The former has removed the book from its fiction list, while the latter has changed the categorization of the new edition of Night and revised the editorial description of a previous text edition to make clear that it considers the book a memoir, not a novel.

For me, having read Night, I regard it as a memoir, one with a trauma narrative that is true in its call to readers to remember the Holocaust and the millions of Jews who died, to learn from those who survived, and most importantly, never to allow such an event to happen again.

Elie Wiesel wrote the book because he believed it is "his duty to bear witness for the dead and for the living". And true enough, Night preserves the lives of the dead as a constant reminder to the living of what was suffered and lost and could go through again if the memories are not etched in ink and the past is allowed to be forgotten. Taken verbatim from the preface to the new translation, this is what Elie Wiesel wrote "For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

In the opening of the very same preface, Elie Wiesel says it all, that Night is the foundation of all his literary works, without which the rest cannot be fully apprehended. To quote "If in my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past lingers in the present, all my writings after Night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear its stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works."

Indeed, Night is Wiesel's masterpiece, a sad, shocking and horrific account of his personal experiences with his father as prisoners in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1944-1945, towards the end of the Second World War in Europe. Though haunting and appalling in its directness, humanity shines from every page of his book as Wiesel bears witness to the Jews taking solace in caring for one another in the face of atrocities in the Nazi German concentration camps. He was 15 years old then.

Ultimately, Night is a story about death and survival. To quote "Listen to me, kid. Don't forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone." As prisoners of war, the Jews are subjected to horrific living conditions and the constant threat of death. To survive, they can only do what is best for themselves. Many eventually only concerned themselves with personal survival. Even so, many do not live through the concentration camps, the "selections" and the death marches. Though Wiesel withstood it all and lived to see liberation from Nazi occupation, he carried with him a corpse of memories that haunt him for the rest of his life. To quote "...I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me."

Night is such a harrowing and engrossing read that before I know it, I have reached the end of the book. Truly, it is a book of great historical importance, albeit one with terrifying power. Night has since been translated into thirty languages and sold millions of copies since its first publication. I am glad to have joined the millions who have read this memoir.

Review: To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

4 stars for To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino.

Annihilation of mankind. This is what comes to the forefront of your mind as I flip to read the first few pages and take on the journey from Hiroshima to Nagasaki on the last train.

This is not a book about the geostrategic issues of great power conflict, nor is it about the rights and wrongs of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 Aug 1945) and Nagasaki (9 Aug 1945) in Japan.

This is an insightful and powerful book on the subject of bombings. It focuses on the singular mission of chronicling the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people before and after the A-bomb. It brings to life, the experience of the people and the endless aftermath. It transports readers into a world that is frightening and painful.

The horrors as told in the book are based on eyewitness accounts supported by knowledgeable and reasonable guesses about the unknown, such as what happened to the people who disappeared at the hypocenters. It is hell for those who died. It is also hell for those who survived; the burdens the hibakusha carried, and the prejudices against them seemed to know no end. The social stigma attached to being an atomic bomb survivor is so strong in Japan that to live on, these people had to hide their identities and disappear. The scary truth is that it still is a continuing sad story of survivor suffering seven decades on.

Nuclear war is an often predicted cause of the extinction of humanity. If World War III ever come to be one day, it can and in all likelihood will be the cause of total annihilation of humankind.

Review: The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project by Robert S. Boynton

2 stars for The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project by Robert S. Boynton.

I feel bad giving this book a 2-star rating given that it is deeply reported and thoroughly researched and that the author has invested countless hours of hard work fact-checking to get this book published.

The thing is, this book reads very much like a boring history lesson, albeit perhaps a necessary one for better understanding as it alternates between the abductees' stories and history of Japan and North Korea.

Regardless of unexciting historical events, this book does address political and social issues such as:

- Why did North Korea go to the trouble of snatching ordinary Japanese people from beaches and small towns?

- Why did Kim Il-sung invite Japan’s Koreans to move to North Korea? With all the challenges it faced in the wake of the Korean War, why would North Korea want such an enormous infusion of people?

- Anyone who is born and raised in the North knows that identity within the society determines fate. It does not matter how smart one is or how hard one works. If identity or public image or presentation is not correct, one will never marry well, will never get the right job and will never succeed.