Customer Reviews

No Common Place: The Holocaust Testimony of Alina Bacall-Zwirn

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it made quite an impact on me. emotionally draining. how Alina kept her sanity is remarkable. Stark did not try to editorialize. instead as painful as it was, he let her tell it in her own way, regardless of syntax. i have never read anything like it...in only three hours i experienced an unforgettable voice.

The author recounts her experiences in a form of interviews given in the 1990's, some fifty years after the events. She also expresses anger over those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, and lists some of her loved ones who perished in this tragedy that supposedly never happened.

Alina Bacall-Zwirn understands the fact that much of the so-called Polish police, in the service of the Germans, actually consisted of ethnic Germans. She comments: "That was the Volksdeutsche, working for Gestapo. That was the Polish police." (p. 40).

She lived in the Warsaw ghetto, and was shipped to Treblinka. She managed to jump from the train, and was aided by a Pole who brought her food (p. 35). She then made it back to Warsaw.

Later, she met with Poles who were being shipped to Germany for forced labor, and Poles who were incarcerated in concentration camps as a result of the failed Warsaw Uprising.

This was a difficult book for me to read. It is in the first person style. I can hear their voices. I did an interview three years ago. It is on tape. Yet i can not listen to it.. Such a difficult time in our youth, in our lives. I recommend this book. This one voice speaks for so many.

I've known several Holocaust survivors, and interviewed a few. This book provides an interesting perspective of a woman who escaped from a train en route to Treblinka --- jumped with her husband through a steel bar that a few prisoners managed to cut --- and escaped to Warsaw.

For some time she and her husband hid successfully, pretending to be Christians. They were eventually caught, however, and like so many victims traversed many concentration camps.

The interviews are quite emotional, but also lacking in many details. The story is difficult to piece together, as the interviews are dated according to when they were taken, not according to the events described.

The book is important for the personal experiences and emotions.

Overall, however, those seeking a total immersion in the experiences of Jewish men and women who survived the war, would be far better served by reading other works --- such as Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories, All But My Life, Alicia, Thanks to My Mother, a purported novel actually taken from the life of Vilna survivor Anya Brodman and The Boys: 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors, among others.

---Alyssa A. Lappen

To all of you who have kept my grandmothers memory alive, I thank you. I think of her everyday and hope she looks down on me. I read about her struggle in this book and also heard a bit of it when she would talk about it when I was younger. I am glad I got to meet her because I never got to meet my biological grandpa, Leo Bacall. I hope you all remember not only my grandmother and those who survived but 6 million who were lost.