Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die

I especially enjoyed the story of Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die because I felt as if Sevek were telling only me his innermost thoughts and feelings of the horror around him. It is written personally and with great anquish and emotion. If you are wanting to read a personal holocaust victim experience--this is it. Sevek was only 8 years old when his hell began, and he spent quite abit of the next 6 years taking care of himself, not knowing where his brother and father were. The best part of this book experience was the chance to ask questions of the author. He lives in Tucson, AZ 6 months a year (as do I) and I had the chance to hear him speak at Pima Community College in my History 274 class. It was powerful. He resides in Chicago the other 6 months of the year. The Holocaust survivors are dwindling at an incredible rate. Sevek is so passionate about giving his story to young people groups. Do yourself a favor and seek out a Holocaust survivor in your community and ask them to share and then record their story. May God never let this happen to mankind again.

This gentleman has written the very gut-wrenching story of his experience during the Holocaust. This one is true,unlike the recent Angel at the Fence "bio" which proved to be a hoax.Why anyone would lie and embellish his or her story of the Holocaust is puzzling to me. There are many legitimate stories,biographies,of the horrors that were seen and committed during the worst time in human history.To lie is a slap in the face of all who perished and all who fought their way through their days in the camps. This is one we should all read. His will to live,despite the surrounding hell he is living in,is powerful reading. That he has chosen to share his story with students of various ages proves that his spirit has remained noble all these years later.He understands first-hand how easy it would be for another Holocaust to happen,and he wants young people to be on alert to fight all bigotry which they encounter.I think the recent,horrible news from Darfur is in the minds of many of us today,and we do all we can to help.

Sidney Finkel, Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die (2005) Paperback, 104 pp. ISBN: 0-9763562-0-1 Reviewed by Kenneth Waltzer, Michigan State University Sidney Finkel, who remained silent about his youthful experiences during the Holocaust for nearly fifty years, and who, since the mid-1990s has become one of the most accomplished speakers appearing in schools and universities in and near Chicago, has published a memoir - Sevek and the Holocaust: The Boy Who Refused to Die. The book is a stirring, quick read, written in a voice that accesses the fright and fearful growing independence of a small boy who, from 1939 to 1945, was in the Piotrkow ghetto, in slave labor camps in central Poland, and then in Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. On the day before Buchenwald was liberated, Sevek was marched out with hundreds of other youth and placed on a train to nowhere, and was not freed until nearly a month later when the train came to Theresienstadt. Sidney was among those who were sent thereafter to England and about whom Sir Martin Gilbert has written in The Boys (1995). He was thirteen years old and had lost nearly all his family. He was now told, as others were, simply to forget his pain. Sidney Finkel has never forgotten his pain, although he long refused to address it. Nor has he forgiven himself for his wish at Buchenwald to be free of his father, who was also in the camp. Like many survivors whom American Jewish writer Meyer Levin, traveling with the U.S. Third Army as it reached the camps, came to know "had somewhere to have betrayed someone, through leaving" [In Search (1950)], Sevek had in a brief encounter at Buchenwald separated himself from his father in order to be spared. Sidney Finkel has spoken to large numbers of audiences and now written this memoir to address the enduring pain. In the process, because he is also smart, diligent, and a clear, unpretentious writer, and because he is connected to many other survivors and tied to remarkable networks of history and memory linked with Piotrkow, Buchenwald, and "the Boys," he has given us a strong and informed record of a young Polish-Jewish boy in the Holocaust. Sevek was born in Lodz in December 1931 and raised, the son of a Jewish flour mill owner, near Piotrkow Trybunalski, about 16 kilometers south of Lodz. This same town produced Israel Meir Lau, former chief Ashkenazic rabbi of Israel and winner of the Israel Prize, and his brother Naphtalie Lau-Lavie, former Israeli consul general in New York. Ben Helfgott, British weight lifting champion in the 1950s, also came from Piotrkow. Sevek was in the closed ghetto 1939-1942 and, like youth elsewhere in the Nazi ghettos in Poland, grew increasingly independent of his parents - working as a runner at the Hortensia glass works and as a laborer unloading trucks at ten years old. He survived the deportations from Piotrkow to Treblinka in October 1942, which swept away his mother and a sister to the gas, an

Mr. Finkel's story is one that each and every one of us should read. For the last four years, I've had the honor of hearing him talk to my 8th graders. This gentle man tells his story of lost youth, survival, and recovery. Please, read this story.

Kirkus Reviews | Kirkus Reports | Kirkus Literar March 2005 Vol 1 / Issue 1 Related Product Klrkus Reviews Kirkus Reports Kirfcus Literary Awan The Book Standard Since its launch in September 2004, Kirkus Discoveries has received hundreds of submissions, from self-published books to books from large publishing houses to out-of-print titles from corporate imprints. From poetry to novels to children's books to academic treatises, the variety of books flowing into the Kirkus Discoveries offices seems to be limitless. Many of the books that Kirkus Discoveries has reviewed so far have not been "discoveries" so much as, well, disappointments. Our hope is that our reviews of those have at least been constructive. Within the rough, though, we're gratified to have found several diamonds. Thus, here, in the inaugural Kirkus Discoveries monthly newsletter, we present 15 of the books we're happy to highlight. They include a book that a major publisher bought after it was reviewed by Kirkus Discoveries and an unpublished manuscript that we hope will not go unpublished much longer." SEVEK" IS ONE OF THE 15 After years of self-repression, Finkel, formerly Sevek Finkelstein, now tells his powerful story of survival in early-1940s Poland. 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. His straightforward manner, told in raw, spare language, renders his memories all the more affecting. He begins with a sheltered childhood in a fairly well-to-do family with loving parents and siblings and mischievous adventures, but then quickly shifts to years of countless atrocities and horrors including running for cover as German planes fired all around him; having his eldest and dearest sister shot dead in a cemetery after her newborn was thrown out of 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, resuming an education in a foreign country after a six-year lapse. The memoir also includes a harrowing account of death in the Treblinka death camp where Finkel's mother, sister Frania and 20 or more close relatives were killed, as well as his brother Isaac's miraculous survival as a Polish army officer caught in enemy territory. With the exception of certain passages that become slightly vague and out of touch with the narrative thread, the narration is smooth and free of pretension-particularly in the chapter entitled "Deportation" and the sections depicting the underground of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Chalk up the infrequent moments of opacity to the protracted length of Finkel's silence on the subject, during which his memory, sense of time, and comprehension were surely distorted. A poignant memoir with a refreshing absence of melodrama or pomp.