The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, with Elizabeth & John Sherrill

While this book became a best seller after its publication in 1971, it does not enjoy the status of a “great book”, except to readers of the Christian faith and others who are drawn to the book’s spiritual lessons.

Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch evangelist, had already written some books before this one - compilations of events and experiences illustrate Christian faith. These events were her testimony, as she spent the greater part of her last thirty years traveling, speaking and working with missionaries throughout the world. Although she had told her story many times, Christian writers Elizabeth and John Sherrill worked to make “The Hiding Place” a definitive account of what she and her family went through as defenders of the Jews in World War II.

Over half of the first part of the book is taken up with introducing the reader to the Ten Boom family, who lived in Haarlem. The father was a watchmaker. At the beginning of the war, his wife had passed away, as had three of her sisters who had lived with them. Of his four grown children, two were married and only the two unmarried sisters, Corrie and Betsie, still lived with their father. Betsie, seven years older than Corrie, had a kind of anemia which was not understood at that time, and so was “sickly” and was expected to live at home and not marry. Corrie had suffered an early disappointment in love when someone who she loved and believed to love her in return instead satisfied his family’s expectations by making a “good marriage”. This circumstance gave Corrie her first real lesson in hardship.

As she is sobbing brokenheartedly, her father lovingly comes to comfort and counsel her. Interestingly enough, he does not tell her that there will be other chances. He says she has two choices, one to smother and deny her love, giving rise to bitterness – or to give up her own feelings and ask for God’s in return. Not God’s love for her, but God’s love for this man, which is so much greater than her own.

Moments like these are the kernels of Corrie’s life, which are what sustain her during imprisonment and provide the impetus for her missionary work after the war. During the war, her family shelters Jews from being taken by the Germans. They become involved with the underground movement and have a secret compartment constructed in their house for Jews to hide in during a raid. They are eventually arrested. While in the local jail, their aged 84 year old father becomes ill and dies in an overcrowded hospital, left unattended in a waiting area. Corrie and Betsie spend two months in a Holland prison, and are reunited in a Holland concentration camp where they live for three months before being transported by cattle car to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women in Germany. Betsie, already ill, survives only two and a half months there before her death.

Although the flow of the narrative is disjointed, the book successfully illuminates key events for the reader interested in suffering and its implications. In Ravensbruck, Corrie changes. She is human - she hates the enemy, the sadistic guards and the cold and starvation and vermin- but she changes. Partly through her sister, who has compassion for everyone, partly through words in the Bible, which they smuggled into the camp. Corrie’s time and place in our history make the book worth reading. Whether or not it’s a “good read”, it’s a read that resonates.

Day After Night by Anita Diamant

In conjunction with a focus on the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust, a writer or filmmaker often raises the question as to whether hope is still possible after such experiences. It’s not a question that goes away, because since World War II there have been other holocausts, which we now usually call genocides. The writer Anita Diamant was intrigued to learn about Jews “escaping” in 1945 from a camp. But the camp was a detainee camp, not a concentration camp. It was in British occupied Palestine, the land that is now Israel.

The League of Nations had charged Great Britain to make Palestine a home for Jews in 1922, but by the end of World War II, Britain refused the flood of Jewish refugees coming to Palestine from Europe. There were some 250,000 of them who made their way secretly by ship from Europe to Palestine. Many were immediately sent back to Europe, but some were kept in camps on the island of Cyprus. Others were held in Atlit detention camp in Palestine, south of Haifa. It was from this camp that members of the Jewish underground movement against British occupation organized the “breakout” of 208 refugees to a nearby kibbutz. When the British soldiers caught up with them, the kibbutz refused to give them up and local school children and residents came and demonstrated in front of the camp in a gesture of solidarity for the refugees’ plight. In the face of the adverse publicity, the British relented and these refugees were allowed to relocate in Palestine.

There are some ironies in how the British ran Atlit, circumstances that recall the “final solution”. Some were transported from the ship to Atlit in boxcars, the camp had barbed wire and a guard tower, and when they arrived they had to strip and go into the showers for delousing. Diamant shows us how traumatic these conditions could be, and yet how at the same time things like the food, the space between bodies, and lumpy mattresses were welcome.

As in The Red Tent, her novel about Dinah of the Old Testament, Diamant wants to bring to light the role of women in history and to investigate any insight that their female perspective can shed for us on historical events. She has crafted a novel of four main female characters who have come from their separate hells to arrive in Atlit. One was a partisan fighter, one a concentration camp survivor, another was hidden by a Dutch farmer, and the other was taken in by a neighbor in Paris who ran a brothel. They all have their hidden devils and unassuaged grief to carry. As Leonie, the former prostitute, sees it, they each walk balancing their heavy load like a native bearer, keeping it "exquisitely balanced."

I found the book absorbing in its evocation of the camp, of the difference between the new arrivals and the old, between the refugees and the Palestinian Jews there to help them, between the British soldiers and the resistance fighters. There are so many snapshots in the book that it takes some effort to connect the background material that Diamant casually offers to slowly build the past lives of the main characters. While there is renewed hope - in a possible relationship, in helping take care of children, in feeding people on a special occasion - mostly the inhabitants weep or show off to each other. There are parts of them frozen by what they went through and what they witnessed.

The resistance fighter is defeated inside by her almost certain knowledge that her mistakes in the field caused her comrades’ death. The girl in the brothel learned to please her German customers but was brutalized anyway, finally running for help to a nearby convent. You might wonder why she didn’t run before this – she had to be beaten down and stripped of any special consideration that she had won for herself. The camp survivor has vowed never again to praise God, not a God that killed her family and all of her existence. The Dutch girl had been “hidden”, but was used to provide sex for a Dutch farmer and his friends. She finally told his wife and was turned over to the Gestapo the next day. She escaped with others through a hole in a cattle car and returned to Amsterdam, to learn, as she had already guessed, that her entire family was dead.

Diamant calls the book Day after Night, but what she shows us is how the night lingers on. The escape to the kibbutz provides some drama for an ending, but the book doesn’t generate real momentum on its own. None of the women really change, except the camp survivor. She begins to venture out of her shell, by extending sympathy to a young boy.

What the book finally feels like is a crafted concoction, with the politics and realities parceled out in small quantities, to seem like “real life”, because everything is understated. But Diamant shouldn’t be so careful to avoid life head on. The dramas that we live come and confront us, and our changes encompass more than just the weight of remembering them.

Anne Frank: the Anne Frank House authorized graphic biography by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon

Instead of a graphic novel of The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a graphic biography of Anne and her family, in which the diary is quoted. The book was well-researched and has panels that record the historical progress of the Nazi party, World War II, and the eventual annihilation of 6 million Jews, along with millions of other victims. All of the Frank family except the father are eventually killed or die in captivity.

The drawings of the characters are carefully reproduced from existing photographs and paintings, and show little Anne being outspoken and rebellious from her childhood. While greatly loved by her family and others, her impetuousness earned her much criticism, especially when she was shut up in the Secret Annex. The Annex were the rooms she and her family hid in for 2 years, with 4 others, that were in the same building as her father’s business.

Many people helped the family, but many Dutch citizens “looked the other way” while Nazi supporters found and rounded up Jews and other undesirables for the concentration camps. The book characterizes the Nazi supporters as “Dutch Nazis”, and makes no mention of the silence of the majority of those living in the Netherlands. The book also takes the standard line of Anne being a world famous writer – without the explanation that her plight actually thrust her and her thoughts into the limelight.

Some reviewers feel that this book can stand alone, and is not simply an extension of the Diary of Anne Frank. But if you only read this, you miss the sweetness, the intense quality Anne had with those around her. You miss her ruthless sketch of the tiresome couple they hid with, her aching feelings of being so pent up, so imprisoned for two years. This biography is well- crafted and informative, but it fails to “flesh out” Anne’s story, no more than Anne herself was able to do.

Matters of Honor / by Louis Begley

American author Louis Begley is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel About Schmidt, a book later adapted into a same titled, Oscar-nominated film starring Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates. Born Ludwik Begleiter in Poland in 1933, Begley survived the deadly World War II genocide of all Polish Jews (he's Jewish) with aid from a compassionate Catholic family who helped hide he and his parents from the Gestapo. After the war, the Begleiters immigrated to America where the family Americanized their name and Ludwik Begleiter officially became Louis Begley. Upon graduating from Harvard, he married and had children, served for a time in the US Army and later went to law school. Despite only beginning his career as a novelist in the early 1990's (when he was in his sixties and still practicing law), Begley has carved out quite a career for himself publishing 8 novels, all well-received. Matters of Honor, Begley's latest published in 2007 is also his most autobiographical observing the relationship of three Harvard University friends in the mid-fifties.

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Thrown together as freshman roommates at Harvard in the fall of 1954, Sam Standish, Archibald P. Palmer III ("Archie") and Henry White quickly hit it off, bonding through their mutual affinity for women, alcohol and other 'gentlemanly' pursuits. On their own for what's really the first time, none feel the least bit homesick. Rather each has reason to put some distance between home and school and would rather establish new identities within the collegiate microcosm than dwell on where they came from. Blue-blooded Sam would seem the most prototypical Ivy Leaguer with his New England roots, an established family name, old money wealth and a boarding school upbringing. Yet that's exactly the classification he wants to separate himself as any silver spoon perks he does have are smoke and mirrors. In all honesty, Sam's parents are a public embarassment: his father's a notorious drunk and his slatternly mother's well-known for her parade of casual affairs. If that weren't reason enough to seclude himself from his preppy brethren, there's the fact that he's also adopted--a secret only he, his parents and the family lawyer know about.

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As a lifelong military brat, Archie has no real roots other than wherever his father's been stationed and nothing so exceptional for a surname absent the deceptively prestigious roman numeral at the end giving off the suspicion of elite breeding. His easy manners and worldwise nature never find him without friends and, consequently, never without a free drink in his hand or a fun-loving girl on his arm. Diametrically opposite of Sam and Archie is Henry, a New York City native who got into Harvard on full academic scholarship. Despite attending one of the crummiest public high schools in Brooklyn, he's nevertheless among of the smartest, most well-read and hardest-working freshman students around. Henry's no nerdy outsider though. His booksmarts and unfashionable looks don't offset his equally acute knack for adapting and fitting in. Just like the other two though, Henry has his uncomfortable past issues which he'd prefer not to get into: he's Jewish, a Polish immigrant, he hid in a cellar during the Gestapo raids, all extended family apart from he and his parents were gassed, etc. On the surface, Henry's tragic past doesn't seem too encumbering. He's upbeat and on top of things mostly, into girls and good times and happy to be out of earshot of his squawking mother, until the day everything changes bringing the three friends into contact with a daunting truth and a decision which could haunt their lives forever.
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Begley knows how to tell a story. Even writing about the holocaust, a genre so top heavy with personalized fiction accounts, the author's ability to peak a reader's interest is remarkable. He writes with a sort of casually sedated style, relaying information about each character with practiced nonchalance. Somehow this gives the story an alarming level of assiduity, the reader keen on all of the subtle moods and motives of the trio of friends who seem like your closest kin (imperfections and all) rather than literary characters. Narrated in past tense by Sam recollects everything from first impressions to girlfriends to nights out on the town as the book moves along at a solid pace, never revealing too much too fast yet offering enough crumbs for the reader to keep the pages turning as the accessible prose slyly allows everyone in to the lives of the three protagonists. (FIC BEGLEY)

Ordinary Men

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Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland / by Christopher Browning

The Holocaust of over 6 million was perpetrated not by a collection of self-deluded madmen nor elite "super" soldiers, but groups (usually 9-15) of average guys, or ‘Ordinary Men’. Active in handling the physical extermination procedures, these reserve battalions, or ordnungspolizei, quite literally enacted the final solution, adhering to the perfunctory details of executing men, women, children, infants, etc.; even as many themselves had families far removed from the horror. So Why? While its not easy to pin down, Browning’s account of the Josefow (Poland) camp gives a good deposition. A chronologue as scrupulous in detail as it is shocking in revelation, it admonishes the full array of influences involved in the process.

As with any operation of Nazi design, mass-murder genocide was a multifarious undertaking (read: organized), involving issues pertaining to the psychology of initial resolve, the group dynamic and hierarchy as well as ultimatums driving things forward. For some, the necessary ‘removal’ of Europe’s racial inferiors was a mere pre-requisite for the Reich's proliferation, a Machiavellian answer to a long-standing problem of socio-economic equanimity. Others weighed the cost of ostracision and coalesced while still more assented out of a need for survival (the threat of personal ‘removal’ always loomed). There were conscientious objectors, members whose sympathy lay with their victims or those with convictions preventing their participation, even as it led to their deaths.
The magnitude of the Holocaust and its legacy is most often viewed from the victim’s perspective. What comes to mind concerning the executors of the act generally concerns those at the top, even as those people—Hitler, Goebbels, Eichmann, Himmler, Heydrich, etc.—were so far removed that little concern involved the middle men. To the Nazi heads, camp administrators were a means to an end and as expendable—to some degree—as the victims themselves. This is an important, tediously constructed chronicle detailing 'the details' of one of history’s most chilling events.

October Reader's Rants

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness /
by Kay Redfield Jamison, M.D.
Dr. Jamison is Chief of the Psychiatry Department at Johns Hopkins. She is also a life long manic-depressive making her a leading authority on this brand of bipolar disorder. Extreme despair and hyperactivity accompany Jamison from adolescence into her 40’s as she struggles through tattered relationships, spending spree manias, even a near fatal suicide attempt—all resulting from her condition. An acute perspective in the realm of depressive illnesses, her memoir is extremely insightful for anyone involved with someone suffering from a disease of this type.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid / by Bill Bryson
Think of Beaver Cleaver in his cuffed jeans and buzz cut eating dinner with his family. Now picture him sneaking in to a strip club. Such is the dichotomy of this authentic, humorous, and openly lascivious memoir by Bill Bryson who somehow embraces the 1950's America without censoring human nature. Bryson uproots his own Iowa childhood reminiscing on a wide spectrum of nuances like grade school drama, red scare follies, and Sunday morning TV. An easy read perhaps most aimed at baby boomers, this is for anyone wanting a laugh with a dose of nostalgia.

The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million / by Daniel Mendolshon

All or most of Holocaust literature is retrospective in nature. And while this book deals heavily with the past, it closes the gap between living history and the present day via Mendelshon’s passionate journey of discovery. Almost like true crime or forensic literature, we see a heavily involved man—Mendolsohn—seeking the truth behind his holocaust era Jewish relatives who vanished during the final solution. Plodding at times, readers may get too bogged down with details to appreciate the mystery.