A+++ story of resistance, revenge, and reconsideration that everyone should read.
Straightforward, super-dramatic, moving, vivid, semi-inspiring retelling of the Nazi occupation of Vilna (which I’ve always known as Vilnius, the largest city of Lithuania) about:
- Establishment of the Jewish ghetto (80K Jews crammed into a tight medieval labyrinth, with houses often having three stories of cellars in part to hide from persecution throughout history)
- “Relocation” of thousands to work camps to the east and then discovery that families and friends are actually being relocated to a firing squad and mass-grave pit in Ponar
- The conflict between the call to arms and other ideas for survival as the ghetto population drops to 15K
- Escape to the forests through the sewers and then teaming up with partisans to undermine the Nazi war effort
- The Soviet surge to the west that liberates the ghetto once it’s down to a few thousand
- The post-WWII after-life of our heroes (Abba, Vikta, Ruzka), particularly Abba’s crusade to poison the drinking water of major German cities and anonymously and without warning take revenge and kill six million Germans (the plan didn’t come off of course but they did manage to hospitalize a few thousand former SS prisoners of war), and then their relocation and participation in the nascent Jewish nation of Israel, including the 1948 war against Egypt and pretty much all surrounding Arab nations.
Makes me want to become one of those aging guys who only reads fat WWII histories.
Audacity, oomph, and heft delivered by basic facts of the story. Authority and execution delivered by the storyteller. But also it made me see how the perma-Israel/Palestine conflict emerges from the Holocaust and makes me want to read more about the history of Israel, especially more of an Arab take. Recommendations are welcome.
Moral complexity up the wazoo when it comes to the surviving Jews ransacking Polish peasants for food and arms and often flat-out killing them and then these super-badass survivors escaping centuries of hatred in the Euro diaspora for an ancient island of their own in a roiling ocean of not-so-welcoming Arabs . . .
Read this thanks to one of those “you may also like” recommendations on the side of the Goodreads screen — good job, GR, I really did like this.
Also read because my totally assimilated father’s Jewish side of the family came from Lithuania (see update below) and my mother’s Catholic side from nearby Poland, so throughout I could imagine myself or relatives in similar circumstances (as Jewish partisans blowing up trains or anti-Semitic Polish peasants ratting them out) had relatives not had the good sense to move to New Jersey about fifty years before the Nazis came to power.
(2024 update: thanks to 23andme, I’ve learned that my father’s side most likely came from what was called Eastern Galicia, what’s now northwestern Ukraine, during a period of mass emigration to the US, Israel, South America, and elsewhere after a series of pogroms in the early 1880s. I now realize that when relatives said “Lithuania” they probably meant the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which predated Galicia).
Anyway, a great relevant read. Posted in honor of Pittsburgh. Also this was among my favorites of the year and it’s beginning to look a lot like year-end accolade season.