Customer Reviews

The Final Station: Umschlagplatz

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book came to me as a surprize. My wife is a librarian and she brought it to me "on spec". I've renewed it twice since. Rymkiewicz weaves here an extraordinary collage of thought and emotion, reason and passion as he leads us through the spectre that was the holocaust in Poland. The narrator is elusive, as if he were the collective mind of all those who lived through the terrible days of the Warsaw Ghetto, its precursors and its aftermath. There is guilt here for the massive consent -- if not cooperation -- with the NAZIs. There is sorrow over the helplessness of ordinary people run over, figuratively, by the tanks and uniforms of the totalitarian state. All is told in a style that defies description in conventional terms; time and substance swim back and forth, making this more a collage of humanity at its weakest and worst rather than a narrative of a single event. A good read, with amazing quotes.

Rymkiewicz's engagement with the past events of the Holocaust, as focused through his own forgotten childhood encounter with the liquidation of Jews in Poland, is a brilliant literary accomplishment and a work of high moral value. It is the first sustained treatment by a Pole of the tragedy that befell the Jews of Poland, whose absent presence haunts every page, and it does so through a complex and imaginative structure that draws on documentary sources and fictional recreation of a world the author could not know. The grudging Kirkus review, cited above, does not do justice to this bold and daring work. Read it for yourselves.

The author was a child during the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto, and describes the Polish wartime experience in relation to that of the Jews he saw being deported to extermination. Occasionally apologetic, sometimes confrontative about responsibility, I found the book to be very readable. Flashbacks/forwards are potentially confusing. Certainly a different slant from the typical Holocaust memoir.