Reviews for Best loved poems of all time

The average rating for Best loved poems of all time based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-23 00:00:00 Thad Marks Janina Bauman was thirteen when she, her mother and sister were interned in the Warsaw Ghetto and she gives us a deeply moving insight into daily life behind the walls. It's always the detail which creates an intimacy between the reader and the subject, that helps us understand the nature of the world evoked, and Janina has a fabulous eye in this regard. She also writes tremendously well. The most depressing aspect of this memoir for me was the behaviour of some of the Poles. Outside the ghetto Jews in hiding were often hunted down by gangs of blackmailers or else charged exorbitant "rent" for the hovels they were forced to stay in. Basically you understand that only the very wealthy Jews had much chance of survival. Clearly racism was rife in Poland and made the Nazi's work a lot easier than in countries like Denmark, Holland, Italy and France.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-23 00:00:00 Patrick Crosby This is an autobiographical account from a teenage girl of life in Warsaw from just before the war until its end. It covers the period of the Warsaw ghetto, which, as Jews Bauman and her family were confined to. We follow Bauman and her extended family through ups and downs via memory and some diary excerpts. Initially the family are quite well off, but once the Nazis invade Poland all that changes and Bauman, her mother and sister spend much of their time in hiding or on the run. Throughout the account the reader also sees Bauman grow up into a young woman. From a middle class life the reader is taken onto the streets of the ghetto where dead bodies lie in the street. Bauman is honest about her account, honest about her own failings and those around her. She is trying to live an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances and trying to find her own identity. The second half of the book is increasingly tense as after the destruction of the ghetto the family hide on the "Aryan" side of the city. They have to move regularly as hiding places are discovered or blackmailers find them: there is a thriving trade in blackmailing Jews in hiding. There are loses as friends and family are caught, some killed, some sent away to camps. With the destruction of Warsaw in the last few months of the war the family end up in a country village. This is the first of Bauman's autobiographical writings, she has been referred to as a sociologist of modern life. She writes with poignancy and warmth and even with some humour. Bauman finds the hiding frustrating, but it can't entirely hide her teenage thoughts and fantasies: "Perhaps we've been wasting the last bits of our lives not even trying to find out what love is" Bauman was still obsessed with books, boys and romance and there is still that spark there despite the horrors. She is able to reflect at a distance: "During the war I learned the truth we usually chose to leave unsaid: that the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. And that the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions" This is a moving and very human account of Warsaw and its Jewish community and Bauman is an excellent narrator.