The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This book is a great start.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. The Irish grew up with tales of the Great Hunger, but the full story is just now unfolding. The admission by Prime Minister Tony Blair of the failure of the English government to support a country that was part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world has set a good beginning to get at the truth. They completely ignored the hate creation of the English press and the landlords who despised the human misery along the roadsides and in the filthy workhouses. The author is hellbent on setting the record straight. He boldly condemns Irish historians, most educated by the English, who downplayed the horror and evaded the issue of British decision-makers’ responsibility. Evictions, emigration and a policy of laissez faire were the British answers to the crisis.
Coogan points out the many other problems to English aid-e.g., to obtain relief, you had to sign over your land, many soup kitchens would only give soup to those who converted to Protestantism, and no relief could be given outside the workhouse. Prime Minister Robert Peel made some effort to assuage the problem, however misguided, allowing the purchase of Indian maize from America, which the Irish couldn’t properly grind and which made them sick.
For seven years beginning in 1845, Phytophthora infestans wreaked havoc on the potato crop in Ireland. The potato was not just the staple of the poor Irish diet it was all they had. Acclaimed Irish historian Coogan ( Ireland in the Twentieth Century, 2004, etc.) opens up the truth about the Irish potato famine, and it’s uglier than you thought.
0 kommentar(er)
