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409 reviews for:
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos
Judy Batalion
4.12 AVERAGE
409 reviews for:
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos
Judy Batalion
4.12 AVERAGE
Batalion dedicated a large portion of her life into this book; a skillful conglomeration of many memoirs written by Jewish women living in WWII Poland. The research and delivery were incredible. She has created such an important piece of history. I absolutely loved how she only focused on the untold stories of these women. Beyond that, this book relays events of WWII that I had hardly thought about before reading this. To name a few: the seemingly slow degression of qualify of life in the ghettos, Jewish resistance in the ghettos, and the lives/relationships of these women after liberation. This book is in many ways a hard read, but worth it.
This was a tough but important read. Thankful for Batalion's work.
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
fast-paced
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
The lives of these women - their histories and families and experiences and legacies - are important. For that alone this book is worth reading. But the way the book was written was a challenge for me. The narrative made it difficult for me to differentiate between many of these women and I couldn’t keep up with where the events happened or to whom or when because of the way the author wove the stories around one another and in time.
I shouldn't have listened to the audiobook. I should've read the book. I didn't have the focus necessary to receive the information.
Untold stories. Though sad and disturbing subject matter, amazing read. Allows the subjects to have their amazing stories told.
I only made it about one third of the way through but I didn't get much of an arc to the stories. They seemed scattered and not super related or intertwined into a single narrative. Though the stories were certainly heroic and deserved to be told.
This is a bleak book with an endless stream of heartbreaking stories presented in a rapid fire mix of terror and heroics. As a mandatory book club read, I quickly realized once begun, that I didn't want to read this. Within the first half hour of reading, I was so depressed as the horror of the Nazi treatment of Poland's Jewish population began weighing on me. I then decided that I just wanted to finish it and limit the feeling of dread to as short a time as possible, so I raced through it. I suppose any true life account of this subject would be the same so it is not the fault of the author, and I suppose others may be more receptive to learning more about the subject. With that in mind, I acknowledge the high value of the work and the necessity of telling the stories of both the atrocities and the heroism of those who fought against them.
In addition to not liking the subject matter, I also did not enjoy the style in which it was presented. The narrative seems to jump from character to character, time to time, and place to place almost randomly. Names come fast and furious and just when we get used to learning the story of one of our heroines, we've moved onto the next without finishing. And when we do come back to the story of the first heroine, so much has happened with other people in other places, that we have to work to remember what happened so far. There is a reference map and a list of characters at the beginning, that makes me feel the editors also thought it would be difficult for the reader to keep names and places straight.
The value of this work is immeasurable. These stories need to be told. But not everyone should read these stories, at least not in this format.
In addition to not liking the subject matter, I also did not enjoy the style in which it was presented. The narrative seems to jump from character to character, time to time, and place to place almost randomly. Names come fast and furious and just when we get used to learning the story of one of our heroines, we've moved onto the next without finishing. And when we do come back to the story of the first heroine, so much has happened with other people in other places, that we have to work to remember what happened so far. There is a reference map and a list of characters at the beginning, that makes me feel the editors also thought it would be difficult for the reader to keep names and places straight.
The value of this work is immeasurable. These stories need to be told. But not everyone should read these stories, at least not in this format.
This is one of the best books about the holocaust I've read. It is painful, moving, awe-inspiring and tragic at once. It really brought to remembrance and deeper understanding for me the survivors I cared for over the years as a hospice and geriatric NP.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
tense