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5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful, touching story, October 17, 2006
This review is from: We Are On Our Own (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful, touching book. It is a harrowing story of a young women's struggle to survive the Holocaust and save her toddler daughter. The story takes place in Hungary in the last year of the war. A resourceful and courageous woman, the mother manages to hide as a servant woman. She is both willing and able to do whatever it takes to stay alive. The latter part of the book is devoted to her husband's search for her and his daughter. This search is eventually successful and the family builds a happy life after the war. The book moved me to tears because it touches the raw pain and desperation both of the mother and of the bewildered child. Unlike many other Holocaust books, this one focuses not so much on the cruelty of the Nazis and their Hungarian helpers, but on the many kind people who took risks to help the two survive or just showed them kindness when it was most needed. One of the central themes of the book is the young child's struggle to understand God in the context of the losses she suffers. Throughout her life, the protagonist yearned to believe in a God that she felt did not exist. It's an interesting theme and is handled in a nuanced manner. This is a graphic novel, in cartoon strip format. I did not fall in love with the images. They lack the graphic power of "Maus." Spiegleman made the cartoon medium work for him, forever changing it. Katin's images seemed to me to be less interesting and challenging. They are carefully drawn and capture the mood, but what made the book work for me was the dialog, and that could have been captured as a narrative as well. This book may not, in my opinion, be appropriate for the younger student because of sexual content. There are two situations of forced sex, and while they are not graphically depicted, the themes are rather adult. There is also discussion of an abortion. The older highschool student should be able to contextualize the material appropriately.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The True Meaning of Displacement, December 20, 2009
This review is from: We Are On Our Own (Hardcover)
Growing up in the Westside of Cleveland in the 1950's, I had many chances to meet people who were displaced Europeans settling in America. In fact there were so many of these people a colloquial and derogatory term was placed to identify these people being the phrase "DP". In essence all these people were trying to do was to seek a new life in America. Little did I know of any of their stories in which they had to endure to get to the shores of the promised new land. One such story is Marian Katin's graphic depiction of her mother and herself fleeing Budapest under Nazi rule in 1944. The very fact that they were Jewish as late as 1944 under Nazi rule gives one the sense that it took a long time for some Nazi occupied countries to be affected by the genocidical programs inherent to this regime. Katin's story which tells of the Nazi terror and later the Soviet invasion shows the true plight of how people lost their homes and in many cases their very lives in the collateral damage of war. Katin's images and narrative show the true emotional and psychological scars of what transpired. The book shows a true and uncensored depiction of true events of a world gone mad. People acting under stress conditions show both their humanistic qualities to help mankind no matter what country they were from and on the other hand people acting selfishly and thinking only of themselves. This story is of people being people under the stress of a world at war caused by political minds seeking their own selfish ends. This graphic story should be added to all the serious historical accumulation of World War II studies showing what this war was truly about. This book is actual history shown in the graphic genre which deserves our serious attention. Very well done and deserving a high five star rating.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
More lives touched by The Holocaust, October 6, 2008
This review is from: We Are On Our Own (Hardcover)
Katin's charming and sorrowful book tells yet another story of escape from WWII Germany. There's no such thing as "just another," because each experience of that time is unique - and this is a unique telling. This combines many viewpoints in different ways. At one level, it alternates between heartwrenching pencil drawings of dark time with a few sporadic scenes from decades after the war, drawn in cheery pastels. The recent images capture snapshots of a happy household, with a child of four or five starting to learn the traditions of Judaism. Wartime scenes show a similar child, torn from her life one step ahead of the antisemitic roundups. That child sees things no child should ever see, saved from the horror of knowing them only by having no way to understand what she has seen. We see them, though, and understand. We see a German officer forcing himself on the child's mother again and again, leaving her sobbing after each encounter - the child thinks she's sad to see him leave. Likewise, that wartime child can re-enact but not comprehend the bombing of the city around her, or the death of a devout Jew's faith in God. It's never explicit, but most of the story seems to have a happy ending. That wartime child grows up, and becomes mother to the modern-time child that we see in the color pages. Maybe any evil, even one of that magnitude, can pass. It must not be forgotten, though, and we now live in crucial years for capturing those experiences. People who lived through that time as adults are passing away and, each time, another set of memories vanishes forever. Katin captures a few of those memories from her own parents and family, and from her own child's-eye experience. Some might find this painful to read - it describes a painful time. A solid core of optimism makes it bearable, though, as in so many other areas of life. -- wiredweird
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