Customer Reviews

The Unheeded Cry: The Gripping Story of Rabbi Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl, the Valian Holocaust Leader Who Battled Both Allied Indiffer (ArtScroll History)

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This book has a special meaning for me since my grandfather Rabbi Joseph Brody was very close with Rabbi Weissmandel. It tells the tale of a Rabbi, who despite his heart condition, risked his life to save many Jews from the gas chambers. He worked tirelessly on a plan to bomb the train tracks that lead to Auschwitz, but this plan was unfortunately nixed by President Roosevelt. I would reccomend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Holocaust. It is well writtena and well researed. (My grandfather's picture can be found on page 245.)

This book has a special meaning for me since my grandfather Rabbi Joseph Brody was very close with Rabbi Weissmandel. It tells the tale of a Rabbi, who despite his heart condition risked his life to save many Jews from the gas chambers. He worked tirelessly on a plan to bomb the train tracks that lead to Auschwitz, but President Roosevelt unfortunately nixed this plan. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Holocaust. It is well written and well researched. (My grandfather's picture can be found on page 245.)

Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl, a hero of mine, is biographed in this tome by Abraham Fuchs. This is a substantial book, full of great photos and details about the war effort, the entire Resistance and especially the part played by the Hungarian Resistance and the partisans.

My critique of this book must include the facile, rather rapid and superficial way Fuchs treats some of the subject matter. Major topics such as the NAZI willingness to stop killing my people for pay...it gets a couple of pages here, a couple of pages there. Fuchs is more interested in including copies of illegible or unintelligible foreign documents, intended to show Weissmandl's busy wartime schedule. The thought is nice, but why not just tell us?

The biographical material on Weissmandl is slobbery and also not very deep. Fuchs believes one of the best tales to tell about the rabbi's personality is one about how the rabbi broke up a young couple because the girl was not Jewish. The rabbi argued that the young man should think of all those lost in the Holocaust before he thought about marrying a Gentile. The rabbi succeeded in splitting them up, and somehow I find that a not very noble story to tell about someone.

I did not like the emphasis on Weissmandl's relationship to the hated Satmar Hasidim, and the overall tone of this book, while typical, is an attitude that must change: it is that the more Orthodox the Jew, the better he is than everyone else. Sad and unnecessary.

Rabbi Weissmandl (who also discovered "the Bible Code" all by himself) was too great, too heroic, to be contained by a somewhat silly biographical sketch as this book is. While it is truly invaluable as a 'skimmer' for WWII resistance facts, it is a very sad biography indeed. I got rather tired of reading the pleading letters Weissmandl wrote to the leaders of the world during the war. Why not JUST TELL US? Isn't that a biographer's job? Fuchs doesn't seem to think so.

A final note: Fuchs follows an old, heavy-handed footnoting system which I find revolting. A person can't read the text properly without all these slop-notes at the page's bottoms--all text which really belongs either in the book text itself or in the BACK. It's like walking around a building that is littered with dangerous construction debris all around its perimeter, and someone like Fuchs ought to know better.

This is a must read for any student of the holocaust. Its full of proofs and documentation regarding hungarian jewry during the war. Rabbi Weismandel had no ulterior motives other than saving jews.