Escape and Sophie Scholl

I have visited concentration camps in Germany a couple times.  Each time, it has seemed incomprehensible that such atrocities were actually carried out.  As I have witnessed extremist ideologies gain greater acceptance throughout my lifetime, I have come to appreciate the lessons taught by the preserved concentration camps even more.  They are memorials to what happens when we put aside basic individual rights and liberties.  They serve as a stark warning about what happens when societies continue down the slippery slope of denying rights to others in the name of a greater good.  When I first visited the concentration camps, I did not have children, but by the time of my second visit, I did.  That made the lessons of the past a little more emotional since the National Socialists in Germany did not spare children from the horrors of the camps.

Escape: Children of the Holocaust by Allan Zullo (ISBN: 978-0-545-09929-5) and Sophie Scholl: Die Weiße Rose by Achim Seiffarth (ISBN: 978-3-12-556024-6) are books written for young people (junior high kids seemed to be the target audience), but present some of the stories of Nazi Germany that are good for readers of any age to know.   Zullo’s book told the story of about a dozen Jewish children and their survival of the Holocaust.  The stories were varied and all captivating.  They usually started with the pre-war life of the kids or, at least, their life under Hitler when it still wasn’t too crazy.  This allowed for the reader to see how quickly things went downhill.  Inevitably, before long, families were separated, people were in ghettos or concentration camps, and life would never be the same again as kids were forced to grow up quickly and learned that the adult world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be since it induced a lot of pain, suffering, and cruelty.  The kids in Zullo’s book all displayed incredible levels of resiliency, though, scraping by and taking advantage of what was few chances and opportunities were given them, such as a truck taking workers to another camp with a sympathetic guard who was known to let one or two people at a time make a run for it.  The stories, which are of those who survived, do not glass over the fact that the survivors of the ghettos and camps were in the vast minority, and it is sobering to read of all the friends and family these survivors lost.  Seiffarth’s book is written for learners of German, but although relatively simply written, still does a great job presenting a fascinating story.  Sophie Scholl was a young woman who went from teenager to college student during the Nazi rise to power.  Originally a believer in what Hitler was doing, as she came closer to adulthood, she saw the errors intrinsic to nationalist socialism.  Following the lead of her older brother, an activist in the underground resistance, her religious father, who could not abide the unfair treatment of Jews and others oppressed by the regime, and a college professor who encouraged free thinking and debate even when it was unpopular, Sophie joined the resistance, helping to distribute anti-Nazi flyers.  Her efforts helped present what was an unpopular opinion to the masses, especially as she helped found resistance cells among young people in cities outside her hometown.  Eventually, the Nazi regime caught up to her, her brother, others in their circle, including their professor, and they were executed.

As stated above, while both books are juvenile literature, they are quality works.  I enjoyed trying to stretch my knowledge of German, the native language of my grandparents and other ancestors who have a story or two of their own involving the Nazi authorities.  The stories in Escape easily kept my attention, told interesting details, and were from a variety of people, such as those from Germany proper as well as from occupied territories.  This variety gave more flavor and a nice, broad overview of what are certainly not isolated incidents.  I thought Sophie Scholl was also a nice overview that provided sufficient detail to be informative and yet not get bogged down.  I had seen a movie on her a few years ago, but this book gave me some new information and was, I thought, better (I always think that about books relative to movies, though).  Both of these books present an interesting and accurate picture of what life was like under the Nazis — for Jews in the first and for conscientious Germans in the other.  They remind us what we should be fighting to avoid, even if it’s only a step or two in that direction, and the kind of people we should be striving to be, even if that striving leads to unpopular positions, ostracization, and, possibly, the ultimate sacrifice.  Liberty — for ourselves and for others — is worth those things.

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Irena’s Children

As a kid, World War II fascinated me, but that was mostly because of the aircraft.  I was not drawn as strongly to tanks, ships, or even the history, although I had a grandfather who fought with the U.S. Army in the Pacific and two grandparents who lived through the war as children in Germany.  It was the airplanes that held my attention as a kid, and I drew, painted, and read about them a lot.  I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime during my elementary school years, an exhibit on Anne Frank came to Salt Lake City, and I had the chance to see it.  That opened a whole new world to me: one of the resistance and the underground, a world where people had to risk their lives simply to do what was right.  That seemed very interesting to me then and has continued to be very interesting throughout my life.

It seems there are many stories to be told about those who did what they could to fight against the Nazis from inside, and Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto by Tilar J. Mazzeo (ISBN: 978-1-4767-7851-8) tells quite an incredible story.  The book chronicles the World War II experience of Irena Sendler, a Polish Catholic who repeatedly risked her life to save Jewish children from the Holocaust.  Over the course of the war, Irena Sendler was able to aid in the escape of at least 2,500 (while she and others did their best to keep records, most of those records were ultimately lost and their reconstruction was admittedly incomplete) Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto and into ethnically Polish homes and orphanges, where they were usually able to escape detection.  It was rarely a simple process, and included the stuff of thrillers and spy movies: escapes through the sewers, disguise, assumed identities, forged documents, illegal networks, and contacts in high places.  Irena didn’t do the work on her own (something she was always very quick to point out), and around her there was a large network of people that included teenagers that were willing to serve as sewer guides, nurses and doctors who helped with false papers, social welfare workers (Irena’s profession) who used their contacts and access to help, friends, and scores of people along the way such as neighbors and business owners that turned their heads the other way when they needed to, even if they couldn’t do more.  At one point, Irena was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, and then she was the one being rescued.  The story is full of adventure and danger.  The author also spent a fair amount of time discussing Irena’s love life an seemed to make a lot of effort to fill the reader in on those who played the largest roles in Irena’s network of anti-Nazi collaborators.

The book was definitely an interesting one and told, as the tag line on the cover says, a “story of courage.”  What was particularly impressive (as is often the case with such stories), was that it didn’t seem that Irena had to summon much courage to do what she did, and neither did those around her.  They simply acted based on what they knew was the right thing to do.  Considering the millions of Jews killed during the Holocaust, the nagging question is always whether or not it was worth it.  Irena herself was scarred for life thanks to Gestapo torture.  She was more haunted, though, by the constant second-guessing that she did herself about whether or not she could’ve done more.  I am reminded of the story of a kid tossing drying star fish back into the ocean who is asked by someone else, “Why do you do this?  There are thousands of starfish on the beach; you can’t possibly help them all.” The response comes after throwing one more back in the water, “I made a differenc to that one.”  The book spent what I thought was too much time discussing Irena’s somewhat conflicted love life, including her love for one of the Jews she worked with in the underground (she divorced her first husband to marry her Jewish lover, Adam, then, divorced him, and after his death, remarried her first husband, so it was complicated, as they say), and I thought it often strayed from the story to provide too many details about those around Irena.  They were also couragous and worthy of having their stories told, but I would’ve appreciated a tighter focus, especially as the author seemed to enjoy noting at every possible chance that most of Irena’s circle (herself included), were socialists and came from somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum (mentioning this once would’ve been sufficient).  Given those criticisms, though, the story really was one of courageously making a difference and is a story well worth reading.  As a kid, it was easy to imagine myself in the resistance.  As an adult, I better understand those who struggled to make the right choices.  Stories like this are great because they inspire us to more easily make those correct choices and help others, even if we only make “a differenc to that one.”

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A River in Darkness

Asia is not usually high on my list of interests.  I have always wanted to visit Japan (likely linked to my dad’s serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there) and I’ve always wanted to visit the famous sights in China.  I once had the opportunity to visit Bangkok, and while I enjoyed it, it was very different from anything I had ever experienced before.  I don’t know a lot about the region in general, but have never been a big fan of North Korea.  Once European Communism fell in the late ’80s and early ’90s, places like Cuba and North Korea have seemed like time warps, holding out unnecessarily while continuing to oppress people.  When people make the decision to try to leave those places, I always find it to be one I can sympathize with.

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa (ISBN: 978-1-5420-4719-7) is just such a tale, although it does have an interesting twist.  The author was not born in North Korea; in fact, he was born in Japan and was ethnically half Japanese.  His dad, who was not native to Japan, moved his family to North Korea under pressure from ethnic compatriots and the pressure of being an ethnic minority in re-building, post-war Japan, where such minorities weren’t always welcome.  The promises of the Communist utopia were very quickly discovered to be a total sham by the author and his family.  However, there was no real opportunity to get out.  The author's family had nothing to offer the Communist Party, so they lived as peasants, eventually finding that living under the radar of the authorities was easier than trying to conform to the system in North Korea.  Eventually, Ishikawa tires of the poverty, starvation, racism, hypocritical inequality, and lack of freedom.  He heads toward the border with China, fearful, but determined to make a break for it since, although that would mean an uncertain future, it was better than the future he could easily predict inside North Korea.  He made it to China, eventually linking up with the Japanese embassy there, which, with great difficulty, helped exfiltrate him to Japan.  Once back, Japan had jumped forward forty or so years, while North Korea had steadily gone backward.  Ishikawa struggled to adjust and felt abandoned by Japan.

The book was interesting, but disheartening.  Ishikawa's childhood is not an easy one, with alcohol abuse and physical abuse having large roles.  The move to North Korea is understandable only from his father's point of view.  Once there, even his father grows disillusioned with their new country, but like so many people in totalitarian, socialist regimes, he never felt empowered or free enough to do anything about his situation.  North Korea is bleak from the family's arrival to the very last page of the book.  The descriptions of life there are simple, yet vivid and powerful.  Readers are drawn in to the dark, gloomy, depressing lives of the underclass in North Korea.  In a way, it like reading Dostoevsky, but it was real.  The story of the escape was a breath of fresh air and involved some risks, risk-takers, and genuinely good people.  Movement between Japanese diplomatic facilities and the flight to Japan have a spy story quality to them.  Ishikawa's return to Japan and struggle to fit in again returns the reader to the more depressing side of the book.  What is clear by the end of the book is that North Korea is an anachronism and deserved its place on George Bush's “axis of evil.”  The book, like other, similar memoirs, serves as a warning against the lack of freedoms engendered by socialist governments everywhere and the positive, although imperfect, results of the free market and capitalism.

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The Long Walk

In eighth grade at Kaysville Junior High, a rather unpopular teacher named Mr. Rice showed us Escape from Sobibor, a movie that tells the story of an uprising in a German concentration camp.  I remember sleeping through some of it, but I also remember being intrigued by it, having learned much earlier about Anne Frank and the underground activity she and her family were involved in.  Later, I learned about the Soviet prison camps, the Gulag.  As with the story behind the movie I saw in junior high, the idea of escape from a vast system, stereotypically cruel and secure in most people's minds, has always been intriguing.  (To be completely honest, escapes from modern-day prisons are pretty intriguing.)  There is something redeeming and inspiring in hearing of people who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the chance — not necessarily freedom itself — just the chance of freedom.

In The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (ISBN: 978-1-59921-975-2) by Sławomir Rawicz, one can read about just such an escape and one that combines World War II history, the Gulag, and adventure travel into one.  Billed as a true story, the reader follows Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer, from Moscow's notorious Lubyanka to the a small outpost of a prison camp in northern Siberia, and then about 4,000 miles south, to India, after his escape.  The escape itself is one of the few truly exciting scenes in the book, as the rest reads much like a travelogue, but it is all adventure after adventure as the small party of fugitives walks through Russia and then the wastelands of Mongolia and China.  They pick up a fellow escapee near Lake Baikal and experience Oriental hospitality over and over again in their travels through the deserts and mountains of western East Asia.  These usually touching, sometimes comical, visits are a major reason the travelers made it to India alive.  As is to be expected, they lose a few of the party along the way to starvation and exhaustion.  In the end, though, their desire to be free is triumphant, as they walk out of the hills and into the arms of a British Indian patrol.

I enjoyed the book, which reads like a novel.  The story was exciting, intriguing, and exhilarating.  It was interesting to read the story of torture at the hands of the Russians, the hardships experienced by the prisoners during the prisoner transfer operation across the vast expanses of Russia, and the way the labor camp was organized.  The escape and the adventures that laid therein were also fun to read about and did give off the sense of the indomitable human spirit.  The only thing that may be a bit of a negative about the book (aside from some mild strong language typical of Englishmen (Rawicz settled in England after the war)) is that it likely doesn't live up to its billing as being a true story.  The epic adventure has gone under the microscope of investigators and researchers a few different times.  Since the author lived in England, the BBC did a bit of research, as well as an American woman who wrote a book about her efforts and her inconclusive results.  The one thing that has been established is that Rawicz likely did not make the trek.  After that, one is left to make one's own conclusions including a number of possibilities ranging from him doing part of it to others completing the year-long hike and from the story being a compilation of others' adventures to it simply being a prisoners' tale that became, thanks to the horrors of war and the Gulag, impressed so strongly in people's minds that they genuinely believed the story was theirs or their acquaintances'.  I am personally partial to the latter two ideas, but think that the book was a great story regardless of veracity and even though I went into my reading of the book knowing about the controversy, and therefore approaching it as fiction, it does cause one to think about freedom, liberty, and the indomitable human spirit.

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Not without My Daughter

Kidnapping is a subject that was terrifying as a kid.  I can honestly say that at times I have figured that any social awkwardness I may experience and discomfort when placed in the company of new people can be traced back to my early childhood and a visceral, albeit somewhat learned, reaction to all things stranger.  Of course, in the world of my childhood, kidnapping was carried out by strangers.  Maybe the 1980s were just a simpler time and people were more upstanding and that's why I didn't know about how in the U.S., most kidnapping is carried out by someone the victim knows, usually a family member.  Or maybe I just had a simplified view of the world around me?

No matter my view of the world, a gripping story of international intrigue, raw, primordial bravery, faith, and patriotism, is told by Betty Mahmoody and William Hoffer in Not without My Daughter (ISBN: 0-312-92588-3), a memoir of Mahmoody's experiences when her husband took her and their daughter to Iran and then forcibly kept them there.  Mahmoody starts with her flight to Iran from America's heartland, where she spent her entire life and moved from her blue-collar beginnings to entertaining and comfort of the upper middle class thanks to her Iranian husband.  She had various reasons for agreeing on the flight to Iran, but staying there indefinitely wasn't one of them.  That such a plan is her husband's plan is apparent within a week of arrival, and it's made worse by the fact that most of his family, and like most eastern cultures, family connections are extensive, is in on the kidnapping.  Mahmoody and her kindergarten-age daughter, Mahtob, endure the next two years under what amounts to house arrest in an unfamiliar and usually hostile foreign land where hatred for America is not only the official line, but something many citizens openly and actively agree with.  Eventually, Mahmoody is able to make contacts with various people, some simple shopkeepers, some foreign government officials, and others who are just the universal kind-hearted person you always hope exists out there.  She uses these contacts to organize a treacherous escape for her and her daughter, and through a few minor miracles, they are smuggled to freedom.

I vaguely remembered hearing about this or a similar case at some point in the news, so when I had the opportunity to read this book, the opportunity seemed very interesting.  The book didn't disappoint.  The bottom line is that the story is a good one — it's an enjoyable book.  I was appreciative of some other aspects of the book, too, though.  I was appreciative of the authors' descriptions of the big city, the lively markets, and sights, sounds, and smells.  I was intrigued by Mahmoody's return to the faith of her childhood even as she came to better understand and appreciate the faith of those around her, including those causing so much grief and pain in her life.  Unlike some critics, who have claimed Mahmoody's description of Iran and Iranians is calloused and even racist or bigoted, I found nothing of the sort in the book.  First of all, she wasn't trying to paint a picture of all Iranians or the whole country; she was writing a memoir, which by its very definition, describes her — and only her — thoughts and experiences.  Second, she pointed out that there were many kind and generous people in her life while in Iran, including those in her husband's family that she came to respect and to a certain extent, love.  Finally, I appreciated the patriotism.  Mahmoody is one who has experienced other cultures and other lands.  While the circumstances obviously bias her, she was remarkably even-handed in describing the things she saw and experienced.  Through all that, though, she came to appreciate her homeland, the USA, even more than ever before because of the real freedoms that we do have and others, sadly, often do not.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.