On a November morning in 1938, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jew hiding in Paris, walked up to the highest ranking Nazi diplomat he could find and shot him. This gripping story of a mysterious Jewish folk hero reveals the little-known chain of events that unleashed the long-planned "Kristallnacht", "The Night of Broken Glass".
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Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
An engagingly written, if often speculative and flawed, biography of the Polish-German-Jewish youth Herschel Grynszpan, whose November 7, 1938, assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris served as the Nazis' pretext for Kristallnacht. Marino, a young British critic and screenwriter, has engaged in no original research, but relied almost exclusively on two previous biographies of his subject. Grynszpan apparently was motivated by short-term rage; his parents were among the 12,000 Polish Jews residing in Germany whom the Nazis ``dumped'' back in their native land in October 1938, and who suffered in a border ``no man's land'' when the Poles refused to accept them. In the hyperventilated and sometimes hagiographic prose that too often characterizes this book, Marino tries to transform the 17-year-old Herschel's deed into something far larger; he makes the utterly unsubstantiated and ludicrous claim that Grynszpan somehow intuited the Holocaust: ``Herschel saw into Hitler's black heart and knew what the dictator was planning.'' Marino does provide some interesting circumstantial evidence that vom Rath may actually have been cooperating with the French intelligence service, but he is unable to document anything conclusively. The second half of his book is the more interesting, for here the author looks at the strange series of bureaucratic accidents and foul-ups, historical contingencies and wild charges (such as that vom Rath had sexually exploited him) that caused the Germans never to try Grynszpan. In fact, his ultimate fate is unknown; the Gestapo may have murdered Grynszpan in 1942, after he spent time in the VIP section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, or in 1945, a few months before the war ended. Rumors have even circulated that he survived under an assumed identity. Marino muses at length on this and a great deal more. Thus, what emerges is a padded, somewhat superficial biography that, from its subtitle on, makes highly inflated claims about its subject. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Take it with a grain of salt.,
By Bohemian Man (Kona Hawaii) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War II (Hardcover)
I gave this book 4 stars rather than 3 only because in spite of its exaggerations, it holds your attention and promotes a side of the story which is not totally impossible.The narration is very good and the author is good at painting a picture of what it felt like living in Poland during that time. Morino does draw his info from other sources, but makes the events more interesting than the others do. Leave this book out on your desk at work and i guarantee you that the title alone will spark conversation.
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Boy Who Started Kristallnacht,
This review is from: Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War II (Hardcover)
This is a book I couldn't put down, and a good companion to Gerald Schwab's The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan. Together they give a well-rounded portrait of a relatively ordinary Jewish boy living in extraordinary times. While he never started WWII--Alfred Naujocks could more reasonably make that claim--Herschel Grynszpan certainly kicked off the Shoah, and deserves to be remembered for his part in what is still the most disturbing chapter in human history. Did he know what the Nazis had in mind when he assassinated Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath? His reaction to the events at the time is proof positive that he most certainly did not. But if you ignore that anomaly, then this is a very interesting, if speculative biography.
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