Customer Reviews

From Ashes to Life: My Memories of the Holocaust

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I was extremely impressed with this book. The author decribes in detail her life before anti-semitism and how it started to change. Her story is emotional and touching.

She was born Celia Landau and changed her name to Lucille. She and her sister Karin were the products of a very close knit family completely torn apart by the Third Reich. Her father gets sent off to a labor camp and a year later they are delivered a box of what supposedly contains his ashes. Eventually Celia, Karin and mother are sent to the Lodz ghetto where surviving is difficult and their mother eventually dies of starvation. Celia's account of this is very sad and moving. She then tells a story of a tender love affair with Szaja in the ghetto, and befriends an elderly couple named Jules and Julius who ironically after liberation, she winds up marrying their son when she moves to New York.

She and her sister Karin are then sent to Auschwitz. Poor Karin is so devastated and having trouble surviving day to day after losing both her parents. Celia's heart is again broken when Karin is not chosen in the selection and is loaded up into a truck and never seen again.

Celia is only weeks away from death when Auschwitz gets liberated. She goes into detail her life after the camps including her testimony during war crimes trials that helped put many of the SS in prison.

She also tells her experiences of going back to Europe in 1991 for the first time since she left. The hostility and indifference against Jews was still alive.

This book is highly recommended. Well written.

As a child in Hamburg, Germany, Celia Landau led a cultured and privileged life. Her father Benjamin had a study full of books and frequently entertained renowned visitors, including philosopher Martin Buber and Rabbi Paul Holzer. This began to unravel when the Nazis came to power. In the summer of 1934, the family traveled to a German spa in Bad Schwartau. As their visit ended, the spa's owner gleefully announced that Hitler would deal with the Jews. The next fall, nine-year-old Celia's grades began to falter as former school friends labeled her "Drechtjude." In 1937, the family were forced out of their condominium at Hohe Weide 25. In October, 1938, her father was carted to prison, then deported to Dachau. In February 1941, a Gestapo agent delivered his "ashes" in a cigar box.

Eight months later, Celia, now 16, was deported with her mother Sala and sister Karin to Lodz. Here they shared an unheated room on Zgierska Street with Julie and Julius Eichengreen and five others. As the vast majority of Jews were shipped like cattle from Lodz, the couple made Celia promise, if ever she went to New York, to find their son, who had left Europe years earlier. On July 13, 1942, Celia's starving and sick mother Sala died.

Before being herself deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, Celia starved and scraped to survive, and lost her sister Karin as well. Her one friend from that period, Elli Sabin, traveled with her in the final transport from Lodz to new horrors. Here she came face to face with the dreaded Dr. Mengele, slaved for some months in an outdoor construction site at the Neuengamme subcamp and in the Blom and Foss Shipyards. In October, she was transferred to Arbeitslager Sasel. Here, to gain access to important files, she promised to transfer her family's house in Altona-Luna Park outside Hamburg to an SS guard. The ploy worked, and she memorized the names and addressed of 42 Nazi guards.

In March 1945, Celia Landau was again transferred, this time to Bergen-Belsen, the disease-ridden camp where Anne Frank and her sister died of Typhus. Fortunately for Laudau, a month later, the camp was liberated, on April 15, 1945. Here she told a British major of her exploit, and was swiftly introduced to Lieutenant-Colonel J.H. Tilling, of Britain's War Crimes Investigations unit. When friends Elli, Hela Dimand and Sabina Zarecki corroborated her story, the British swiftly transferred Celia Landau to Hanover Germany, where she helped bring 17 Nazis to justice.

Her assistance to the British War Crimes unit gave Celia new opportunities. What she did with them is but one of the things that makes this book fascinating. This is the story of an extraordinary woman who sought revenge only through her own good deeds.

The one thing missing from this book is what gave her the courage to go on. Alyssa A. Lappen

This is by far the best personalised account of the Holocaust I've read to date. Celia manages to convey the horrors and degredation experienced by the Jewish people living through the Holocaust, and yet still manages to temper the account with a constant almost irrepressible sense of hope.

I've visited Bergen-Belsen several times, and seen the official documentation and memorials, but From Ashes to Life really brought it all into perspective.

This is a book that provides a factual first hand account of what actually happened, and doesn't pull any punches, but it still emminently readable by everyone.

I had real difficulty putting From Ashes to Live down once I'd started it, and would recommend it to anyone!

I had a hard time putting this book down. Eichengreen does a good job of telling her story - it wasn't confusing and I didn't come away with a lot of unanswered questions. Obviously someone who didn't experience the Holocaust first hand will never fully appreciate or understand it, but I feel like I gained some insight into through this book.

This is a very well written personal story about this most awful period in our world's history.

A remarkable story of a Holocaust survivor. She was a teenager (about the same age as Anne Frank) when she had to endure the horrors of the Lodz Ghetto and the concentration camps. Her story of survival and her recent return to Germany, and how she met her husband, make for fascinating reading.

Cecelia Landau first learned about antisemitism when she was only eight years old. Vacationing with her family, she overheard a man telling her father that Hitler would "take care of the Jews." As a young child, she was full of questions, pestering her reluctant father to explain what it all meant.

That was 1933. Soon after, the lovely childhood Landau had known began to crumble. Restrictions were placed upon Jews like the Landaus, until it was almost unbearable to function. Of Polish background but living in Germany, the family found that neither country was willing to help or protect them.

Before long, Landau's father was taken to Dachau, and she, her mother, and little sister Karen taken to the Lodz ghetto. The teenage Cecelia would be the only one to leave the ghetto alive -- although, considering she was heading for a succession of several concentration camps, whether that was lucky or not remained to be seen.

Against all odds, Landau managed to survive the war, working for the British in the aftermath and doing everything she possibly could to get out of Germany. She eventually landed in the United States, where she changed her name to Lucille and focused all her determination on a new life.

Eichengreen's story is a true inspiration, as a young girl faced unspeakable horror and still managed to come out a winner in the end.

A moving account of the author's experiences during the Holocaust. Lacks continuity and details like many of this type of story, but compelling just the same. A fast read, and you will remember her for a long time.

"From Ashes to Life" was a book about the holocaust. It was very inspirational and heartfelt. It takes place back in 1933 in Poland-Germany when Celia's eight years old. Everything in life seemed to be going very well as regular little kid. 'Til one day her father was called off and was beaten, starved and then soon killed. The Germans took over all of Poland and made sure that the people who were really Jews paid for all the punishments. Even the people who had some jewish blood in them they were also taken away and killed.
In Celia's life she went through a ton of heartache. She was there when her mother died and when her sister was taken away from her to be killed. As Celia got older, she was able to leave Poland-Germany and come to America. Here she met her husband in New York. Her husband and her went back to Germany in 1991 and tried to overcome the horrible past. Her name today is Lucille Eichengreen. This book is great and I personally would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the holocaust.

I listenesd to an interview this author had some years ago and she sounds like she is so hateful and mean! She is mean to the maximum. No one denies some of the events in the book, but this woman is truly out of her mind, exaggerating and dramatizing and obsessing throughout. I have read many Holocaust books, but hers, just a waste,tone it down Lucille, you are too wierd and eccentric. Making the whole event sound like a circus!