Hungary Books

Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

Olga Lengyel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

"Life" in Auschwitz; Nazi Genocidal Ambitions beyond Jews and Gypsies 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This review is based on the original (1947) edition. Let's focus on some seldom-developed issues.

Large numbers of Polish clergy were sent to Auschwitz in the early years of the camp. However, Lengyel reports many more arriving in 1944 (pp. 108-110). They were often put to death immediately; the remainder being subject to degrading humiliations and tortures. Polish children were frozen to death (p. 210) and mostly Polish women were used by the Germans for vivisection experiments. (p. 176) Ironically, the Germans forgot their racism when they included the use of Jewish blood for transfusions to save the lives of wounded German soldiers. (p. 176)

Recent claims that Jews and homosexuals were consistently treated the most harshly are fallacious. Lengyel says: "It would be difficult to say which of the internees were treated worst. Most of us, whether political, racial, or criminal prisoners, were reduced to existence on the animal level. But the Jews and the Russians were treated cruelly. On the other hand, the German internees, whether common-law criminals, perverts, or political prisoners, benefited from certain privileges. They provided large numbers of the camp functionaries; and, no matter what their duties, were never chosen in the dreaded `selection'." (p. 44) In fact, homosexuals were also victimizers: "The prisoners, men or women, were frequently abused by the German barrack leaders, among whom was a high percentage of homosexuals and other perverts." (p. 185) The camp "beasts" included Irma Griese, an SS woman (p. 40) and bisexual, who forced her way on female inmates and then disposed of them when she got tired of them. (pp. 185-186)

Lengyel describes the Sonderkommando revolt, as well as the escape of a Polish inmate with his Jewess lover (pp. 124). Unfortunately, the SS uniforms that they had stolen fooled the Germans for only a few weeks.

Once finished with the Jews, the Germans intended to do the same to the Slavs. After describing gruesome experiments designed to perfect mass-sterilization methods (pp. 177-179), Lengyel comments: "Once we asked an Aryan German inmate, a former social worker, for the basic reason for the sterilization and castration. Before his captivity he had been active in German politics and had known many eminent people. He told us that the Germans had a geopolitical reason for these experiments. If they could sterilize all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of `inferior' peoples. At the same time, the living populations would be able to serve as laborers for about thirty years. After that time, the German surplus population would need all the space in these countries, and the `inferiors' would perish without descendants." (pp. 179-180)

Editorial Review:

Having lost her husband, her parents, and her two young sons to the Nazi exterminators, Olga Lengyel had little to live for during her seven-month internment in Auschwitz. Only Lengyel's work in the prisoners' underground resistance and the need to tell this story kept her fighting for survival. She survived by her wit and incredible strength. Despite her horrifying closeness to the subject, FIVE CHIMNEYS does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism. When first published (two years after World War 2 ended), Albert Einstein was so moved by her story that he wrote a personal letter to Lengyel, thanking her for her "very frank, very well written book". Today, with 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia, and neo-Nazism on the rise in western Europe, we cannot afford to forget the grisly lessons of the Holocaust. FIVE CHIMNEYS is a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen wherever and whenever ethnic hatreds, religious bigotries, and racial discriminations are permitted to exist.

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 50 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Gripping Horrific Account of Life in the Auschwitz Death Camp 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Miklos Nyiszli has written (1960) a graphic, gruesome, first-hand account of his time working as a doctor in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Due to his previous medical training in medicine and pathology, Dr. Nyiszli was spared by the hideously inhuman Dr. Josef Mengele, to be the medical doctor to the Sonderkommando, the 600-plus Jewish prisioners who actually operated the creamatorium ovens which incinerated over 3,000 inmates a day. Dr. Nyiszli also became the chief pathologist for Dr. Mengele's infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners, performing disections and autopsies, all explained in great detail.

Dr. Nyiszli had permission from Dr. Mengele to travel through the camp, and therefore witnessed atrocities that are shock all sensibilities, and are sickening in the cruelty in which they were carried out. One wonders how the guards can kill in such a matter of fact manner, so many men, women, children, grandmothers, and grandfathers, without being emotionally devastated. He described the entire process of how the Jewish populations were induced to walk into the gas chambers without resistance. How they died a horrible death in the gas chambers, how their bodies were striped of hair and gold teeth, and then incinerated in non-stop 24 hour a day operation in the four ovens. When the gas chambers were overflowing with Jewish bodies, he writes of hundreds of others standing in line to be shot to death with a single bullet in the back of the head, then dumped into a long burning death pit, created for just such a purpose. He describes how a 16 year old girl miraculously survived being gassed in the chamber, only to be shot the next day. He describes how whole camps of upwards of 4,500 people were "liquidated" in one day. Dr. Nyiszli is continually stunned by the utter brutality of the German Nazis and the ultimate purpose of Auschwitz - to destroy the Jewish race and other "undesirables".

Since the Sonderkommando group of prisoners were themselves shot to death every 4 months to prevent anyone from telling the world what the Germans were doing in the camps, it is a miracle that Dr. Nyiszli survived to tell the atrocities of the death camp.

Fortunately for history, and for the lesson of man's inhumanity to man, we have Dr. Nyiszli's account to tell the world the truth about what happened in Hiltler's concentration camps. Although very disturbing to read, this is an important account that absolutely refutes modern-day revisionists who claim there was no holocaust, or that is was greatly exaggerated.

This book is not for young eyes. The descriptions of the deaths are too vivid. However, it is an important book for students of history and for any who need to be reminded of the incredible cruelty man is capable of. While sobering and horrific to read, I do recommend this book to those interested in the holocaust. It is one of the better books in the genre.

James Konedog Koenig

Editorial Review:

Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available."

Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Carl E. Schorske

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A landmark book from one of the truly original scholars of our time: a magnificent revelation of turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born.

"Not only is it a splendid exploration of several aspects of early modernism in their political context; it is an indicator of how the discipline of intellectual history is currently practiced by its most able and ambitious craftsmen. It is also a moving vindication of historical study itself, in the face of modernism's defiant suggestion that history is obsolete."

-- David A. Hollinger, History Book Club Review

"Each of [the seven separate studies] can be read separately....Yet they are so artfully designed and integrated that one who reads them in order is impressed by the book's wholeness and the momentum of its argument."

-- Gordon A. Craig, The New Republic

"A profound work...on one of the most important chapters of modern intellectual history" -- H.R. Trevor-Roper, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Invaluable to the social and political historian...as well as to those more concerned with the arts" -- John Willett, The New York Review of Books

"A work of original synthesis and scholarship. Engrossing."

-- Newsweek

The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent

John Stoye

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"In his splendid study The Siege of Vienna, the Oxford historian John Stoye provides a detailed account of the intricate machinations between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Mr. Stoye's description of the siege itself is masterly. He seems to know every inch of ground, every earthwork and fortification around the Imperial City, and he follows the action meticulously."-The Wall Street Journal

"Worthy of the pen of Herodotus. . . . It is a measure of the fascination of Mr. Stoye's subject that one should think of comparing his treatment of it with the work of the greatest historians."-The Times Literary Supplement

"John Stoye is the master of every aspect of his subject."-Daily Telegraph

The siege of Vienna in 1683 was one of the turning points in European history. So great was its impact that countries normally jealous and hostile sank their differences to throw back the armies of Islam and their savage Tartar allies.

The consequences of defeat were momentous: The Ottomans lost half of their European territories, which led to the final collapse of their empire, and the Habsburgs turned their attention from France and the Rhine frontier to the rich pickings of the Balkans. That hot September day in 1683 witnessed the last great trial of strength between the East and the West-and opened an epoch in European history that lasted until the First World War.

John Stoye, the author of several books on European history, is a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he lives.

My Brother's Voice: How a Young Hungarian Boy Survived the Holocaust: A True Story

Stephen Nasser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 72 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Stephen "Pista" Nassar his TRUE story! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Before I begin..because this comment is long if you want a heartfelt personal account of the Holocaust READ THIS BOOK!!
On a recent trip to Poland I was fortunate (or unfortunate enough) to visit the Auschwitz concentration camp. The visit heigthened my interest in the Holocaust that we have all heard of, read books and saw pictures of. However, the impact of actually being there in the buildings that housed those that survived the gas chambers by being "strong" enough to work. The gas chambers and crematorium where hundreds of thousands of the weak, the sick, the old, most women and children too young to work, met a horrific end to their precious lives! This very camp is where 13 year old Steven "Pista" and his 16 year old brother Ardis, along with their family members, began their journey after being rounded up by the Nazis.

After visiting Auschwitz and returning home to Las Vegas, I became thirsty for knowledge to understand how such a horrific event could have occured right under our noses as WWII was in full bloom! I began reading and watching everything I could get my hands on, beginning with Schindler's List. I had seen the movie when it first came out, but it was far more impactful after actually visiting the factory, which is also being turned into a memorial much like Auschwitz. As I read book after book and watched movie after movie I still could not get my arms around the event. One morning I was reading our local paper, The Review Journal I came across an Ad about My Brothers Voice. I hurried to the nearest bookstore and bought the book. I began reading the book and could not put it down. I would read before I went to work.....worry about Pista and Ardis all day, hurrying to return home at the end of my day so I could read more, and to make sure they were OK. I read the book in 2 days!

Of all the books I had read, including the Diary of Anne Frank..all paled in comparison to the extremely well written account of Dear Pista and Ardis' horrific journey. As I read the book I felt like I was there with them, could see what they saw, and feel what they felt! At this point, I will add that I am an American Catholic with an unexplained ignorance of what really happened from 1939-1945....that ignorance no longer exists! After reading this book I felt I knew Pista and Ardis, that is how well written this book is. It also helped me to put some closure to my recent obsession...the Holocaust.

About one month after reading this wonderfully written book, I had the pleasure of meeting Pista, who it turns out lives right here in Las Vegas! I saw another Ad in the paper advertising his book and a phone number to call if interested in having him speak at schools, churches, and other organizations. I work for MGM Mirage which is a huge advocate of Diversity Training. I thought how wonderful if we could have him speak at some of our many Diversity Classes! I called the number and to my surprise it was PISTA that answered the phone. I was speechless, for a couple of seconds!!!! After a lengthy conversation with this wonderful man it turned out that he was having a book signing that very night. After work I rushed home to get my daughter and went to listen and learn more from Pista! He is such a sweet and passionate man, now fortunately much older than the 13 year old boy that endured what no child or adult should have to. He is not bitter, he is not predudiced, he has forgiven, but not forgotten what we must all learn more about. Not just to be better Americans and appreciate how lucky we are to be born in the US, but to be better human beings!! To love our families and our friends, to be grateful that we have good food and plenty of it to eat. We have a warm comfortable bed to sleep in and we work hard to have these things, not work because we are forced and beaten falling into "bed" starving, having eaten only a small piece of sawdust bread after a hard days work. Unimagenable...you bet, but TRUE! It would be impossible to write a book like My Brother's Voice without having lived through Pista's misfortune of being born to a family of Hungarian Jews! Same as my opening comment, my closing comment is the same.....READ THIS BOOK!!! I promise you, you will see the world through different eyes!

Denise Fillmore
Las Vegas, Nevada

Editorial Review:

Stephen "Pista" Nasser was 13 years old when the Nazis whisked him and his family away from their home in Hungary to Auschwitz. His memories of that terrifying experience are still vivid, and his love for his brother Andris still brings a husky tone to his voice when he remembers the terrible ordeal they endured together. Stephens account of the Holocaust, told in the refreshingly direct and optimistic language of a young boy, will help every reader to understand that the Holocaust was real, and that, if you have enough love, determination, and will power, there is always a better tomorrow!

To See You Again: A True Story of Love in A Time of War: A True Story of Love in a Time of War

Betty Schimmel, Joyce Gabriel

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Saw the Schimmels at my school 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I am a high-school student in Arizona. We had to read this book for school, and the Schimmels came to our class to talk about their experiences as Holocaust survivors.
I didn't really care that much about the Richie love story once I met them in person. Mr. & Mrs. Schimmel are people devoted to each other and, no matter how it happened, found an incredible love story of their own. I hope someday to have a relationship like theirs is now.
Their survival really made a difference to the world, since they are here to tell their story. There are a lot of people my age that think the Holocaust never happened. I know it did because I met people who lived through it and spend all their time telling students about the war. It was really touching, and a lot of us were crying hearing about all the terrible things that happened to them and we were all thinking about how we might have been in the same situation.
I guess the best part of the book is what people will do to survive, but the really cool thing is that Betty took the time to write it and tell everyone about her story.

Editorial Review:

In the romantic city of their youth, two lovers face the most heartwrenching decision of their lives--can they leave their families and begin a new life once more?

Betty Schimmel's memoir has already sparked the enthusiasm of publishers around the world and is destined to receive similarly great acclaim from the broad audience of readers who will no doubt be captured by her powerful story. This true story of love and devotion begins in Budapest during World War II. Two wartime lovers vow that, if ever separated, they will find each other no matter what happens, and no matter the cost. Thirty years later--having survived life in a concentration camp, and now married to another man--Betty Schimmel returns to Budapest to confront her past and rediscovers the lost love that has shadowed her life for decades.

A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889

Frederic Morton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Hypnotic Portrayal 4 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Vienna poised at the end of the 19th century. A striking mix of political ferment, intellectual creativity, gaiety and despair. Resident are an astonishing collection of people whose work would later touch not only Vienna, but resound world-wide: Freud in psychiatry, Mahler in music, Hertzl with the Zionist movement and Klimt in art. And at the center of political and social life of the city is its bright hope for the coming new century - Crown Prince Rudolf. Through 1888 the pace in the city builds to a fever pitch as Vienna begins its season of Carnival.

The other side of Vienna - hopeless poverty. A repressive regime. Catholic Vienna is rich in suicides - more per capita than other European cities. And not just simple suicides, but bizarre suicides staged with flair... The tightrope walker who leapt from a window with a rope attached to his neck, his note explaining "The rope was my life and the rope is my death." Morton tells us "he left a diary which consisted of paper scraps artfully tied together by a miniature rope."

On January 30th, Vienna's bright hope faded when the Crown Prince Rudolf capped the suicide season by killing his mistress, Mary Vetsera, and then himself at his hunting lodge, Mayerling. The hopes for the new century were gone. And then, just four months later, on April 20th, 1889 the harbinger of the new century, Adolf Hitler, was born. And none of us were the same again

Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin De Siecle Vienna

Robert Weldon Whalen

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Editorial Review:

The culture of fin de siècle Vienna continues to fascinate and has been examined at length. There are indeed massive studies of Freud, Mahler, Loos, Klimt, and many other notables from that era. But, in almost every case, these studies ignore the religious dimension of Viennese modernist culture, implying -- if not arguing outright -- that "modernism" and "religion" are contrary, even hostile, categories.

Taking a very different tack, Robert Weldon Whalen in Sacred Spring posits the striking thesis that Viennese modernism, far from being secular, was in fact a deeply religious movement. In vivid language Whalen examines this era of "being torn apart and rising again," casting a penetrating gaze on those Viennese who were on the cutting edge of modern thought. Though the book focuses on avant-garde art, it also connects materials from journalism, popular culture, and contemporary politics in often unusual ways.

Students of modernism, the arts, and European cultural history will find that Sacred Spring offers an intriguing, compelling perspective on their subjects. Featuring a beautifully written narrative, the book will also appeal to all readers fascinated by the intersection of culture and faith, by the connection between the arts and the sacred.

Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

Frederic Morton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

More than 5 stars! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is a favorite of mine, all the info about the Fin du siecle, Rudolph, and why we went into World War 1, and why some young people don't make it somehow!

Amazing and amazingly entertaining book, very very higly recommended. I dont have anything to add to the info of the book itself, go for the editorial reviews.

Editorial Review:

Thunder at Twilight is a landmark of historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna—and in the life of the twentieth century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph—and soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill ten million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis—Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.

The Lonely Empress: Elizabeth of Austria

Joan Haslip

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Reads more like a novel than a biography 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 12 people found this review helpful.

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I was somewhat reluctant to first start reading The Lonely Empress because, from the some of the biographies I've read (but certainly not all!), they tend to start out interesting but then become dull and boring. It usually takes a talented author to write a biography on a boring royal. But even an unskilled author would have no trouble about sounding fascinating if their subject matter was Elisabeth of Austria.

Born a mere daughter of a duke in Bavaria, Elisabeth had a fairytale (ish) romance. The emperor of Austria, Francis Joseph, was already engaged to Elisabeth's sister Helen when he fell in love with her. All of a sudden, to everyone's surprise, the Emperor started to rant about the grace and beauty of this younger sister, much to the dismay of his mother, the archduchess Sophie, who thought that Helen would become the perfect empress.

Elisabeth was still a child when she became engaged to the Emperor. Suddenly, she wasn't allowed to run wild, like she had been when she was younger. Elisabeth had been known to skip her lessons and go out riding for hours. She inherited her father's peculiarity and was known to be her happiest when surrounded by less than royal people. Her father, Duke Max, was renowned for his strangeness. He was known to travel the Bavarian countryside to escape his duties and delighted in circuses. The poor Duchess Ludovica, Elisabeth's mother, must have had a terrible time with her daughter and equally childish husband. Because of her strangeness and wild country ways, the Viennese court look down upon Elisabeth.

What makes this book more interesting is how the author has portrayed Elisabeth. She doesn't try to make her into a selfish, spoiled woman yet she doesn't spend the whole book describing her flawless beauty. Elisabeth seems to be a difficult topic to write about. As many people who have met the Empress say about her throughout the book, "She could be quite charming when she wanted to be. Yet she could also become cold and haughty."

Elisabeth has you admiring her at times, like when she tries to help the Hungarian people regain their Constitution, and at other times hating her, the way she treated her husband and children, the woman whose husband spent fortunes building her three homes around Europe and who still wasn't grateful or satisfied. This woman traveled to countries far away so she could escape her duties as an Empress and her husband.

But one feels for Elisabeth at how much misfortune she had dealt with in her life. She seems to be a caged bird, she seems to have those natures that cannot be trapped or caged. She needed wide spaces so she can spread her wings. The author portrayed Elisabeth excellently and made the book an enjoyable read.

Editorial Review:

Consort to Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, Elizabeth was a modern woman who fled the confines of Habsburg to roam free--she fancied dangerous riding, sailing and poetry--but her life ended with her assassination in 1896. "Haslip writes with vividness and immediacy... a serious book which is highly readable." --Edward Crankshaw.