"Sevek and The Holocaust"
Reviews
Boston University
ELIE WIESEL
University Professor and
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities
December 6, 2004
Dear Sevek,
Thank you for sending me the
galley proofs of your book; it brings back memories that never
leave me. It will move all those who want to know why, in
those dark times of evil, so much suffering was inflicted
on children your age.
You know how deeply I feel about memory. Many readers will
thank you for yours.
With affection,
ELIE WIESEL
Kirkus Reviews:
SEVEK AND THE HOLOCAUST- THE BOY WHO REFUSED TO DIE
An honest and awe-inspiring tale of bittersweet
survival in the face of great odds and oppression.
After years of repression, Finkel, aka Sevek
Finkelstein, realizes that it is time to tell his story. Prompted
by his daughter and feeling a need to exorcize his demons,
Finkel presents his (and his family's) experiences before,
during and after the Holocaust as a person of Jewish descent
living in Poland.
He writes in a straightforward manner using
raw, bare language which makes this memoir all the more powerful.
Finkel's story begins with a sheltered childhood growing up
in a fairly well-to-do family with loving parents and siblings
and mischievous adventures and then quickly changes to years
filled with atrocities and horrors such as running for cover
as German planes open-fired around him, having his eldest
and dearest sister shot dead in a cemetery after having her
newborn thrown out a window by German officers, living in
a cramped and disease-ridden ghetto, constantly hiding from
certain death at a bevy of concentration camps, eating grass
for survival in the final days before reaching freedom and
finally the difficulty and joys of resuming an education in
a foreign country after a six-year gap.
The memoir includes a harrowing account of
death in the infamous Treblinka death camp where Finkel's
mother, sister Frania and twenty or more close relatives were
killed and his brother Isaac's miraculous story of survival
as a Polish army officer caught in enemy territory. The narration
is smooth and free of pretension...
Touching and moving without melodrama or
pomp -- a memoir to read and from which to learn.
SEVEK AND THE HOLOCAUST- THE BOY WHO REFUSED
TO DIE
Sidney Finkel - self-published (104 pp.)
$10.00
ISBN: 0-9763562-0-1
SIR MARTIN GILBERT,
C.B.E, D.LITT.
LONDON
12/22/04
This is a story of the Holocaust told through
the voice and eyes of a boy who lived through it, saw all
its horrors, and survived. Through his memories we are brought
very close indeed to a terrifying time of destruction.
We also learn of the extraordinary process
of rehabilitation in Britain when Sidney Finkel was one of
a group of survivors flown from Prague to begin a new life
in a country they had never seen and whose language they could
not speak. And then, departure for the United States, where
he lives today, and has given us all the privilege of reading
his remarkable story.
SIR MARTIN GILBERT
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