Reviews for No common place

The average rating for No common place based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-02 00:00:00 Kurt Zahn A poignant yet extraordinary memoir of Alina Bacall-Zwirn, a Holocaust survivor of 4 Nazi concentration camps. She was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1922, and later immigrated to US in 1949. This memoir is structured in conversation style. So there were dialogues between Alina, Sophie, and Jared. There were also notes by Jared on the sides of the pages providing additional information. Because the memoir was done this way, it was more emotional and gives a deeper connection with Alina and the events that took place.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-01 00:00:00 David Meade This is one of the most haunting Holocaust memoirs I've read, and I've read a lot of them. The author was a newly minted pediatrician at the Warsaw Ghetto Children's Hospital and went on to sneak over to the Aryan side of the city and join the resistance. Curiously, she writes little about herself -- you know nothing about her life before the war and next to nothing about her family, though she does describe her husband's death and mentions that her mother was deported to Treblinka. To mention just one of the searing episodes in this story: During the liquidation of the ghetto, as the Nazis were shooting patients and throwing into trucks those that could still walk, Dr. Szwajger went to the tuberculosis ward and gave the children each an overdose of morphine, telling them it would take their pain away. She had promised to stay with the children until the end, so she waited until they all went to sleep, then she ran for her life. But decades later she was haunted by the thought that maybe one or two of them woke up later, alone. Though this book is frustratingly vague at times and it ends abruptly, I think if I could recommend only five books to someone who wanted to learn about what the Holocaust was like, I Remember Nothing More would be one of them. I applaud the author for her courage to finally tell her story. Very few people are left alive who remember it firsthand; Dr. Szwajger herself died in 1993.