Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land

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By: Sara Nomberg-Przytyk
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EDITORIAL REVIEW

"From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness." With these words Sara Nomberg-Przytyk begins this painful and compelling account of her experiences while imprisoned for two years in the infamous death camp. Writing twenty years after her liberation, she recreates the events of a dark past which, in her own words, would have driven her mad had she tried to relive it sooner. But while she records unimaginable atrocities, she also richly describes the human compassion that stubbornly survived despite the backdrop of camp depersonalization and imminent extermination.

Commemorative in spirit and artistic in form, Auschwitz convincingly portrays the paradoxes of human nature in extreme circumstances. With consummate understatement Nomberg-Przytyk describes the behavior of concentration camp inmates as she relentlessly and pitilessly examines her own motives and feelings. In this world unmitigated cruelty coexisted with nobility, rapacity with self-sacrifice, indifference with selfless compassion. This book offers a chilling view of the human drama that existed in Auschwitz.

From her portraits of camp personalities, an extraordinary and horrifying profile emerges of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose medical experiments resulted in the slaughter of nearly half a million Jews. Nomberg-Przytyk's job as an attendant in Mengle's hospital allowed her to observe this Angel of Death firsthand and to provide us with the most complete description to date of his monstrous activities.

The original Polish manuscript was discovered by Eli Pfefferkorn in 1980 in the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem. Not knowing the fate of the journal's author, Pfefferkorn spent two years searching and finally located Nomberg-Przytyk in Canada. Subsequent interviews revealed the history of the manuscript, the author's background, and brought the journal into perspective.

PRODUCT DETAILS

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Pub. Date: 30th August 1986
Catalog: Book
Media: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 197
Ean: 9780807841600
Isbn: 0807841609

ABOUT THIS BOOK

USER REVIEWS

Riveting
~ Written on Apr 18, 2009. out of users found this review helpful.

Incredibly frightening to know these things happened. I will never understand Holocaust deniers. Nobody could make up the details found in this book.

An Objective Review of Auschwitz: True Tales From a Grotesque Land
~ Written on Jan 30, 2009. 5 out of 6 users found this review helpful.

Auschwitz was a place of true horrors. This story was a collection of tales of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's accounts of the haunting land. Originally written in Nomberg-Przytyk's native tongue of polish, each chapter of the memoir was its own chilling tale of her experiences in one of the most notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz. She was held there from January of 1944 to January of 1945, and while imprisoned witnessed the murder of countless souls and brutality in its worst. She was starved, beaten, and dehumanized, and had to witness the same treatment to others. This book was a collection of some of her memories of the holocaust as she experienced it.
All in all I believe Nomberg-Przytyk's book, Auschwitz True Tales from a Grotesque Land, was nothing special. It was a bit emotionally evoking, but the author embellished too much and failed to let the text flow properly. In my opinion the attempted memoir was a dud and failed to impress. The book lacked a flow and a consistent timeline. There were many words that were still in Nomberg-Przytyk's native tongue of Polish, or German. This also distracted from the flow of the book, and made things harder to follow. Despite the glossary (located in the back of the book) it was difficult to decipher what each word meant and to remember it for future reference. Also, Nomberg-Przytyk embellished a lot. There were many facts that were stretched, or at points, appeared to be entirely made up. It made the accounts seem less credible and pulled the reader away from the words. My advice to any possible readers is to skip this book and try another if one is searching for a factual and compelling holocaust novel, because Nomberg-Przytyk fell a bit short of the mark on this one.

Riveting account of the hell that was Auschwitz
~ Written on Jan 10, 2009. out of users found this review helpful.

Numerous memoirs have been written by survivors of the infamous Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, yet each memoir gives us unique personal testimonies of those horrifying times when some genuinely questioned the presence of God. In Sara Nomberg-Przytyk's "True Tales from a Grotesque Land", I genuinely empathised with the characters who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Despite their best efforts to dehumanize their victims, the Nazis were not able to entirely strip away all their victims' resilience of spirit. Yes, there are stories of inmates stealing from each other, yet there are also stories of immense courage and determination.

Like many other Holocaust testimonies, this work also reiterates the horrors of the 'selections' [for life or death] and the randomness of this process is truly baffling -ultimately, a harrowing portrait of daily life in the death camp emerges and it is one that I will never be able to forget. That Sara survived her ordeal is miraculous enough, but to have recorded it for posterity is simply astounding and a testament to her determination that the world should not forget what happened during the Holocaust.

A must-read!
~ Written on Dec 21, 2008. out of users found this review helpful.

Nomberg-Przytyk's story is immediate, brutal, and unrelenting as it sweeps its reader into the horror of survival at the Auschwitz death camp. One will learn about the trickery used by the Nazis to more easily deport the Jews to the death camp, the "selection" process for deciding life or death (at which the nefarious Mengele himself was often present), and what it took to survive. I was quite shocked to learn that a prisoner hierarchy system existed at the camp, and that knowing the right combination of certain inmates could help increase one's likelihood of survival. Another aspect of the Holocaust Nomberg-Przytyk covers that rarely gets any mention is the subject of the forced marches preceding the fall of Auschwitz. A truly incredible story, and a must-read and must-own not solely for WWII historians, but for Women's Studies enthusiasts too!

Fascinating
~ Written on Feb 25, 2008. 1 out of 1 users found this review helpful.

This book is a fascinating. I enjoyed the different stories that wove this book together. I'm very pleased with my purchase. When you hear about the holocaust, you know and feel that it was horrendous, then you read this book, and realize just how horrendous it was.

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