In 1941, German troops occupying the Polish town of Kolno machine-gunned into ditches its remaining 2000 Jewish inhabitants. In this poignant narrative, Karlin, an American novelist and former helicopter gunner in Vietnam, reenacts his 1993 visit to Kolno, where his mother (who died in 1991) had lived prior to emigrating to the U.S. in her youth; his father, a boxer, died when he was five, leaving the family to struggle in Manhattan and White Plains, N.Y. For Karlin, the Germans' extermination of Kolno's Jewish community fused in his mind with the 1968 My Lai massacre, in which U.S. soldiers systematically raped, mutilated and machine-gunned into ditches 500 Vietnamese villagers. Novelistic flashbacks to the saga of Karlin's grandparents and their family in Poland and America are interwoven with history and sharp reportage as he visits the sites of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Treblinka extermination camp; in the camp, Jewish prisoners staged a revolt, killed guards, blew up the gas chambers and escaped to the forest. This is a haunting meditation on human courage and the erosion of morality by war.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Novelist and editor Karlin (The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers, LJ 11/15/95) takes a physical and spiritual journey to Kolno, Poland, where his ancestors lived before and during the Holocaust. Karlin re-creates his family's history and their suffering, describing the murder of the Jews by machine gun in Kolno in July 1941. As a Vietnam veteran, Karlin especially feels the horror of the Holocaust through the filter of his previous experience. He looks for answers as to why such events happened in the past, why similar events still happen, and how they affect people today. His book is unusual in relating personal history from Vietnam to family experience of the Holocaust, and his insights are keen and potentially helpful. Recommended for larger collections.?Mary F. Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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