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richardwells's review against another edition
3.0
I've read more than a few Holocaust histories and memoirs. They are unfailingly wrenching. The journey from the ghetto to the crematorium is always a study in the systematic degradation of a people, and the gamut of abuse runs from the petty to the horrendous. The Nazis created and managed a method of monstrous behavior unparalleled in history. I'm squarely on the side that it should be required in the modern history curriculum of every school - as long as we have curricula and schools, and the way the world turns it makes you wonder.
Otto Dov Kulka was 11 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Common perception is that Auschwitz was a single camp where Jews (and all the other undesirable elements) were taken to be selected for work or death. Auschwitz was actually a city of death surrounded by suburbs of various functions. Auschwitz and its suburban camps were the author's Metropolis of Death, and with that label he explores the memories of his time there as if in a mythical land. Although Mr. Kulka is a renowned Holocaust historian and scholar, this is his only memoir, and he sees the past through a scrim of memory that softens the atrocious. It seems to me to be a necessary strategy. It's a way to make sense of incidents as senseless and surreal as singing the Ode to Joy as part of a children's choir at the selection site where the healthy were separated from the immediately doomed.
None of us really see our childhoods clearly. Sifting through memory can only be an inexact excavation. Exploring, reflecting, and meditating upon trauma is a courageous act no matter how it's done. Mr. Kulka's method opens us up the strangeness of the events. (Think about Steven Spielberg's decision to film Schindler's List in black and white. It created a remove that allowed us to look more closely. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death accomplishes the same by casting childhood, even in the camps, as a mythological and slightly hazy time.)
All Holocaust books are difficult, this one is no different, but there is a poetry of remembrance here that pierces our defenses in a particularly astute way, and the poetry lingers beyond the facts.
Otto Dov Kulka was 11 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Common perception is that Auschwitz was a single camp where Jews (and all the other undesirable elements) were taken to be selected for work or death. Auschwitz was actually a city of death surrounded by suburbs of various functions. Auschwitz and its suburban camps were the author's Metropolis of Death, and with that label he explores the memories of his time there as if in a mythical land. Although Mr. Kulka is a renowned Holocaust historian and scholar, this is his only memoir, and he sees the past through a scrim of memory that softens the atrocious. It seems to me to be a necessary strategy. It's a way to make sense of incidents as senseless and surreal as singing the Ode to Joy as part of a children's choir at the selection site where the healthy were separated from the immediately doomed.
None of us really see our childhoods clearly. Sifting through memory can only be an inexact excavation. Exploring, reflecting, and meditating upon trauma is a courageous act no matter how it's done. Mr. Kulka's method opens us up the strangeness of the events. (Think about Steven Spielberg's decision to film Schindler's List in black and white. It created a remove that allowed us to look more closely. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death accomplishes the same by casting childhood, even in the camps, as a mythological and slightly hazy time.)
All Holocaust books are difficult, this one is no different, but there is a poetry of remembrance here that pierces our defenses in a particularly astute way, and the poetry lingers beyond the facts.
schoolofholly's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
5.0
Possibly the most impactful book I’ve ever read!
daralexandria's review
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Death, Death of parent, War, Genocide, Child death, Deportation, and Antisemitism
marionafb4's review against another edition
5.0
Un llibre molt recomanable sobre l’experiència personal de l’autor al camp ‘familiar’ de Theresienstadt, adscrit a Auschwitz, i del qual no en tenia cap notícia. Crec que, a més, el llibre és una lectura molt necessària pel fet que l’autor ho va escriure decennis després de la seva posada en llibertat, cosa que li atorga una capa de maduresa i reflexió molt interessant. Molt recomanable!
richardwells's review
3.0
I've read more than a few Holocaust histories and memoirs. They are unfailingly wrenching. The journey from the ghetto to the crematorium is always a study in the systematic degradation of a people, and the gamut of abuse runs from the petty to the horrendous. The Nazis created and managed a method of monstrous behavior unparalleled in history. I'm squarely on the side that it should be required in the modern history curriculum of every school - as long as we have curricula and schools, and the way the world turns it makes you wonder.
Otto Dov Kulka was 11 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Common perception is that Auschwitz was a single camp where Jews (and all the other undesirable elements) were taken to be selected for work or death. Auschwitz was actually a city of death surrounded by suburbs of various functions. Auschwitz and its suburban camps were the author's Metropolis of Death, and with that label he explores the memories of his time there as if in a mythical land. Although Mr. Kulka is a renowned Holocaust historian and scholar, this is his only memoir, and he sees the past through a scrim of memory that softens the atrocious. It seems to me to be a necessary strategy. It's a way to make sense of incidents as senseless and surreal as singing the Ode to Joy as part of a children's choir at the selection site where the healthy were separated from the immediately doomed.
None of us really see our childhoods clearly. Sifting through memory can only be an inexact excavation. Exploring, reflecting, and meditating upon trauma is a courageous act no matter how it's done. Mr. Kulka's method opens us up the strangeness of the events. (Think about Steven Spielberg's decision to film Schindler's List in black and white. It created a remove that allowed us to look more closely. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death accomplishes the same by casting childhood, even in the camps, as a mythological and slightly hazy time.)
All Holocaust books are difficult, this one is no different, but there is a poetry of remembrance here that pierces our defenses in a particularly astute way, and the poetry lingers beyond the facts.
Otto Dov Kulka was 11 years old when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Common perception is that Auschwitz was a single camp where Jews (and all the other undesirable elements) were taken to be selected for work or death. Auschwitz was actually a city of death surrounded by suburbs of various functions. Auschwitz and its suburban camps were the author's Metropolis of Death, and with that label he explores the memories of his time there as if in a mythical land. Although Mr. Kulka is a renowned Holocaust historian and scholar, this is his only memoir, and he sees the past through a scrim of memory that softens the atrocious. It seems to me to be a necessary strategy. It's a way to make sense of incidents as senseless and surreal as singing the Ode to Joy as part of a children's choir at the selection site where the healthy were separated from the immediately doomed.
None of us really see our childhoods clearly. Sifting through memory can only be an inexact excavation. Exploring, reflecting, and meditating upon trauma is a courageous act no matter how it's done. Mr. Kulka's method opens us up the strangeness of the events. (Think about Steven Spielberg's decision to film Schindler's List in black and white. It created a remove that allowed us to look more closely. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death accomplishes the same by casting childhood, even in the camps, as a mythological and slightly hazy time.)
All Holocaust books are difficult, this one is no different, but there is a poetry of remembrance here that pierces our defenses in a particularly astute way, and the poetry lingers beyond the facts.
tykewriter's review
4.0
DISCLAIMER: I received a free review copy of this title from the publisher in my day job capacity as a reviewer for Cheshire Today...
Beauty in the midst of Auschwitz must seem a strange concept, but that is one of the many apparent paradoxes one might perceive in Otto Dov Kulka’s personal testament to the Holocaust.
Certainly, as Kulka himself relays in ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’, the author is himself struck by the strangeness of the observation, yet as his own words testify “the blue of the sky in this land is many times stronger than any blue one can see anywhere else”. This was in Auschwitz; surrounded by so much senseless death, constrained by the bleak landscape of the camp, the colour blue takes on a whole new intensity.
The strangeness is compounded by the strangest phenomenon of all, the family camp, so-called, where the boy Kulka found himself living amidst a strange discontinuity of normal family and cultural life, yet immersed at the very same time in the continuation of cultural and social living. In stark contrast to the by-now-familiar images of Auschwitz, here there were no striped uniforms, no shaven heads; there were choirs, and schools maintained, intellectual activity, a semblance of life. Again, paradoxical, contradictory, the way the inmates of the camp continued to cling to the norms and practices, one might say the very fabric of civilised society – indeed that they were allowed to – amidst the wastelands of death that lay all around them.
But what was the family camp?
You can read the rest of this review over at Cheshire Today.
Beauty in the midst of Auschwitz must seem a strange concept, but that is one of the many apparent paradoxes one might perceive in Otto Dov Kulka’s personal testament to the Holocaust.
Certainly, as Kulka himself relays in ‘Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death’, the author is himself struck by the strangeness of the observation, yet as his own words testify “the blue of the sky in this land is many times stronger than any blue one can see anywhere else”. This was in Auschwitz; surrounded by so much senseless death, constrained by the bleak landscape of the camp, the colour blue takes on a whole new intensity.
The strangeness is compounded by the strangest phenomenon of all, the family camp, so-called, where the boy Kulka found himself living amidst a strange discontinuity of normal family and cultural life, yet immersed at the very same time in the continuation of cultural and social living. In stark contrast to the by-now-familiar images of Auschwitz, here there were no striped uniforms, no shaven heads; there were choirs, and schools maintained, intellectual activity, a semblance of life. Again, paradoxical, contradictory, the way the inmates of the camp continued to cling to the norms and practices, one might say the very fabric of civilised society – indeed that they were allowed to – amidst the wastelands of death that lay all around them.
But what was the family camp?
You can read the rest of this review over at Cheshire Today.
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