Customer Reviews

To Life

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

 

 

This book, about a girl named Riva who survived the holocaust and rebuilt her life, was an amazing memoir by Ruth Minsky Sender. It showed how hard the holocaust was. I was so impressed with how well written this book is. Ruth Minsky Sender's story really inspires me. This was an excellent book.

This is a really good book.The Cage, the book that came befor this book, was really good but this one is better. It tells of what happened after Riva's concentration camp is liberated. It tells of the hardships that Riva has trying to find family...This is a great novel and its a good book to read if you loved The Cage.

Some of you are probably wondering why I wrote this review and how I had the nerve to criticize a book in which a Holocaust survivor told their story. So first I must say that I am NOT belittling the horrors that Ruth Minsky Sender went through or minimizing her astounding bravery as she faced them, I am critquing the way this book was presented.

Picking up right were "The Cage" left off, "To Life" chronicles Riva's (Ruth's) life immediately following her liberation from a concentration camp. Horrors still plague Riva, and she finds that the heartache of discovering the deaths of her family member and friends and attempting to rebuild her life is in some ways as horrible as the Holocaust itself. But Riva carries bravely on, marrying fellow survivor Moniek, having children, and wondering what her future holds.

The values of hope, courage, bravery, optimism, selflessness, and love shown throughout "To Life" are totally precious and the finest aspect of this novel. While portraying the intense grief she endured following WW2, Sender also portrays her (and her family's) determination to focus on their new life and make the best of their situation. Although many of the book's settings and happenings are depressing, Sender refuses to make "To Life" a book without some happiness and much hope for the future. For its portrayal of many excellent ideals, "To Life" is to be commended.

So, as I have said before, I am not attacking the author when I discuss the less-than-perfect aspects of this book. Really, I think the "book" would have been excellent were it simply shortened somewhat and made into a final "section" of "The Cage." Many of the happenings in "To Life" were repetitive, and the happenings in the author's life shared through this book would have been even more moving and gripping if they were shortened somewhat; it would have heightened their impact.

Hopefully no one takes offense from this review. The events in this book deserve to be shared and heard, and I believe that it is important to relieve what Jews suffered AFTER the Holocaust, I just believe the author's story could have been told in a different and better format.

My daughter just loves this book. She read it three times and now asked me to get her more books written by this auther.

I quite liked this book, particularly because it's a sequel to 'The Cage,' and there just aren't that many books of this nature out there currently, about what happened to the survivors after the Shoah and how they picked up their lives in the first five or so years afterwards, when they were coming to grips with everything that had happened, searching desperately for relatives, finding out they may have been the only survivors left, rebuilding their lives, and immigrating, be it to America, Israel, Canada, Australia, or someplace else. The first part of the book is quite good, the part right after Riva and her friend Karola are liberated and eventually make their way back to Lodz, only to find they appear to be the only survivors of their families and no one has come back to look for them yet; after that the two girls move on to the city of Wroclaw, where they eventually have to part ways and move on to different DP camps, though not before each have gotten married to men they met and fell in love with in that rather short time period. And because of the way in which Grafenort is liberated, the girls are pretty much on their own and have to fend for themselves and make their own way to safety and back to Poland; they didn't want to stick around for another group of Russian soldiers after the ones who liberated them just left, or for personnel such as doctors and relief workers to come, the way it happened in other liberated camps such as Bergen-Belsen. They really had to rely upon themselves.

I think the book could have been more gripping and personally involving and intense had there been more details and character development; it's not that I didn't like the characters and feel for them, just that a lot of these very emotional situations and interactions are related in almost a matter-of-fact way instead of really delving into more deep and complex descriptions. Maybe that's because most of the chapters are so short; I know this is intended for a younger audience, but I've read a lot of YA and older JA books on this same subject which had a more emotionally harrowing, personal, and memorable feel to them because there were more details and not as much repetition or frequent skipping of blocks of time. The obvious bravery, courage, love, and hope against hope Riva, her friends, and her family experienced in these years would have been even more obvious and emotionally involving had they just been developed in more depth more often instead of being told in a formulaic brief way.

The author makes the book "real". The descriptive words used in this novel makes you get the feelings that the characters in the book feels. Every piece of the book can be painted into a picture. After years and years of agony. The families get split up during the Holocaust. The family reunites together and sharing the adventures they had from moving camps to camps. A scene that I really enjoyed is the scene when the main characters get freed from the death camps and the gas chambers. I enjoyed this book because I like war books, and I recommend this book to people that want a little bit of action and to people that like history. After I read this novel, I realized that people shouldn't be racists or a whole new war might begin.

After I read The Cage, I just had to read To Life. It is such a moving and touching story! Ruth Minsky Sender, the author of these two wonderful books, came and visited my school. She is an amazing women! She spent the day telling the facts that arent in her books. She is such a precious and delicate women that has so much information to offer.

To Life is the story of what happened to Riva when the concentration camp she spent years in was finally liberated.

Honestly, The Cage was infinetely more interesting to me than this book was, but The Cage is without a doubt the best book I've ever read. To Life is not uninteresting by any means, however.

The struggles Riva must go through are heart-wrenching. It really makes a person appreciate the life they have. When something good finally happens for Riva, the reader feels happy for her because she's been through so much. If you're going to read this book, you've just got to read The Cage first.