Author: whatcathyreadnext

One Hundred Miracles by Zuzana Ruzicková with Wendy Holden #BookReview

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One Hundred MiraclesAbout the Book

Zuzana Ruzicková grew up in 1930s Czechoslovakia dreaming of two things: Johann Sebastian Bach and the piano. But her melodic childhood was torn apart when, in 1939, the Nazis invaded. Uprooted from her home and transported from Auschwitz to Hamburg to Bergen-Belsen, Zuzana endured the unimaginable. Through it all, a slip of paper printed with her favourite piece of Bach’s music became her talisman.

Reborn through the unwavering power of music, Zuzana would go on to become one of the twentieth century’s most renowned musicians and the only harpsichordist to record the entirety of Bach’s keyboard works. Her story, told here in her own words before her death in 2017, stands as a remarkable testimony of Holocaust survival, as well as a joyful celebration of art and resistance.

Format: Paperback (368 pages)    Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 14th May 2020 Genre: Memoir, History

Purchase links*
Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

Subtitled Music, Auschwitz, Survival and Love, One Hundred Miracles is a collaboration between Zuzana Ruzicková and author and journalist, Wendy Holden. Sadly, Zuzana died only two weeks after the interviews on which the book is based had been completed. In her Author’s Note, Wendy describes Zuzana as “a life-enhancing spirit” and how she was determined to bear witness to history. Wendy says she will forever feel “humbled by her courage and resilience in the face of so much suffering, prejudice and adversity.”

I’ve read a few Holocaust memoirs (such as my Try Something Similar recommendation below) and a number of historical novels which have the persecution of Jewish people by the Nazis during World War 2 as their basis. For example The Good Doctor of Warsaw by Elisabeth Gifford, A Quiet Genocideby Glenn Bryant and The Hidden Village by Imogen Matthews. An unique element of One Hundred Miracles is its equal emphasis on Zuzana’s passion for music and her experiences both during and after the war.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about the structure of the book which moves frequently back and forth in time rather than progressing chronologically. For instance, the first chapter is set in 1960, the next is set in 1927 depicting Zuzana’s idyllic childhood, and the third moves forward to 1949, after the period she spent in the camps.

However, as I progressed through the book I came to see the wisdom of the non-sequential structure. For one thing, it means the most harrowing parts of Zuzana’s story (including her time in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and in a work camp in Hamburg) are recounted in instalments; reading them sequentially might have felt overwhelming. Also, structuring the narrative in this way reflects the fact that Zuzana’s life was not just about her time in the concentration camps. She had a life before and afterwards. In fact, her life after the war was a demonstration of the Nazis’ ultimate failure to obliterate Zuzana and people like her from the face of the earth.

It’s clear Zuzana’s relationship with music was a central part of her life. Reflecting on what it takes to be a musician, she writes, “It is not enough to be gifted, or diligent. You have to be a little bit crazy. You have to have the feeling that you cannot live without music.” Given its importance to her, it was particularly moving to read how the physical and psychological effects of her experiences nearly robbed her of the joy of music and the ability to perform. She writes, “For me music was a feeling – a feeling I almost lost – and I had to work very hard to get it back. Music was my defiance.”

There is a particularly moving scene during her time in the work camp in Hamburg in which she hears Chopin being played on the radio and finds it almost unbearable that, as she puts it, “somebody was playing Chopin out there in the world, and that I was absolutely cut off from it“. Another chilling moment is when Zuzana hears the sound of a well-known march by a Czech composer being played in the SS officers’ quarters one evening while they abuse young girls chosen from amongst the camp inmates. Ever afterwards, hearing that piece of music haunts her.

Thanks to the efforts of a young man called Fredy Hirsch, a hero in every sense of the word, who persuades the camp commander to allow him to set up a separate block for the children, Zuzana is assigned to help teach the children. Sometimes the camp guards come to listen to the children sing or perform. Most chillingly, none other than Dr. Mengele becomes a daily visitor, “smiling as he chatted to the children, sat them on his knee, and encouraged them to call him ‘Uncle’“.

Sadly, Zuzana’s struggles to pursue her musical career didn’t end with the War as she continued to face restrictions on travel abroad because of the Soviet Union’s influence over Czechoslovakia. However, she showed the same level of defiance in overcoming these obstacles as she had throughout the rest of her life.

Apart from Johann Sebastian Bach, who had “stolen her heart” when she was nine years old and to whom the book is dedicated, the love of Zuzana’s life was Viktor Kalabis, her husband, himself a talented composer. Typically, she recalls, “I fell in love with his music long before I fell in love with him.” The couple never had children but Zuzana always regarded the young musicians she taught and the children they in turn sent to her for lessons as a surrogate family. “It has been a kind of motherhood“, she reflects.

Like many other survivors of Nazi atrocities, Zuzana felt an acute, but wholly unjustified in my view, sense of guilt that she survived when so many others were less fortunate. She writes, “I have spent my life trying to pay my debts to those who didn’t come back by working hard and trying to make myself worthy of being alive“.

There are many other inspiring quotations by Zuzana I could have included, in addition to those already mentioned. There was one, however, with which I had to take issue. Near the end of the book, Zuzana writes, “I am not a person of extraordinary strength. I survived all the camps and the terrible experiences, not because of myself, it had nothing to do with me. It was one hundred miracles.” Sorry, Zuzana, I disagree. True, there were moments of good fortune but it was the incredible resilience, fortitude and courage of Zuzana (and her mother) that enabled them to take advantage of that good fortune and survive. Perhaps, we make our own miracles…

Listen to Wendy’s podcast in which she talks about the book. My thanks to Ella at Bloomsbury for my review copy.

In three words: Inspiring, emotional, moving

Try something similar: Living Among The Dead: My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength by Adena Bernstein Astrowsky

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About the Authors

Zuzana Ruzicková was a celebrated Czech harpsichordist and a survivor of three Nazi concentration and slave labour camps. She recorded over one hundred albums, performed across the world to great acclaim, and became an influential teacher at the Prague Academy. Zuzana died in Prague in 2017 aged ninety.

Wendy Holden is the author of more than thirty published titles, many of them about the lives of remarkable women. A journalist and former war correspondent, she wrote the bestselling book Born Survivors, about three mothers and their babies who survived the Holocaust.

Connect with Wendy
Website | Twitter | Facebook

 

Patrol by Fred Majdalany #BookReview #BlogTour @I_W_M @angelamarymar

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Patrol BT Poster

Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Patrol by Fred Majdalany, another in the Imperial War Museum’s Wartime Classics series. My thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to participate and to Angela Martin and the Imperial War Museum for my review copy.

The Wartime Classics series was launched in September 2019 to great acclaim. The novels were all written either during or just after the Second World War and are currently out of print. As part of the Imperial War Museum’s commitment to telling the stories of those who experienced conflict first hand, each novel is written directly from the author’s own experience and takes the reader right into the heart of the battle.

Each book has an introduction by Alan Jeffreys (Senior Curator, Second World War, Imperial War Museums) that sets it in context and gives the wider historical background. He says, ‘researching the Wartime Classics has been one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve worked on in my years at IWM. It’s been very exciting rediscovering these fantastic novels and helping to bring them to the wider readership they so deserve’.

You can find a complete list of the books published so far in the Wartime Classics series here.

Look out for my review of another book in the series, Warriors for the Working Day by Peter Elstob later this month.

Patrol CoverAbout the Book

1943, the North African desert. Major Tim Sheldon, close to battle-exhaustion, is tasked with carrying out a futile and unexpected patrol mission. Fred Majdalany’s intimate, tense novel puts this so-called minor action centre stage, as over the course of the day and through the night of the patrol itself, Sheldon reminisces about his time as a soldier, his own future, and what it means to confront fear.

Patrol was a bestseller when it was first published in 1953. Clearly autobiographical, it is based on Fred Madjalany’s own experiences in Tunisia as part of the North African campaign, in particular his command of a night patrol and his time in hospital when wounded. The fictional battalion in the novel is based on 2nd Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers into which Madjalany was commissioned in 1940. Infantry battalions such as this were constantly in action with little respite, and the officers were very young by peace time standards. The stress of battle aged them considerably.

Format: Paperback (192 pages)      Publisher: Imperial War Museum
Publication date: 23rd April 2020 Genre: Fiction

Find Patrol on Goodreads

Purchase links*
Publisher | Amazon UK | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme

My Review

“He was stubbornly certain that tonight’s effort would serve no useful purpose whatsoever.”

What really comes across as Sheldon leads his men out on what he believes is a futile exercise – a night time reconnaissance patrol in enemy held territory to the so-called White Farm – is the “deep loneliness of command”. Despite his meticulous preparations and reconnaissance, at one point Sheldon fears he may have led the patrol off their intended course in the darkness of no-man’s land. The burden of responsibility weighs so heavy on him that his previous gratitude for his men’s willingness to follow him so unquestioningly becomes an entirely different emotion. “He hated them because he was lost and could feel their eyes behind him. He hated them because the whole patrol was unnecessary and silly…” Unlike the reader, little does Sheldon know just how random, if not criminally negligent, was the choice of White Farm as the objective for their patrol.

In the middle section of the book, Sheldon’s looks back on his wartime experiences up to this point, including his relationship with a nurse during time spent in hospital recovering from a wound incurred during a previous skirmish with the enemy. It’s a period which seems to him now to have been “an interlude of unreality, a fantasy, a mad incredible honeymoon”. It was also during this period that he had his first face-to-face encounter with the enemy in the person of a wounded German officer. He reflects on the strange metamorphosis of “the Enemy” from an abstraction into a person, a person he finds himself thinking as they chat about books and music, “not at all unlike himself”.

Thanks to the helpful and informative introduction by Alan Jeffreys, I was able to get my head around the Army hierarchy – brigades, battalions, companies, and so on. A theme of the book is the gulf that Sheldon perceives between the demeanour, experiences and, frankly, the capability of those at the top, and those on the front line. “They were a curious lot, these HQ people: they had the glossy, confident look of successful businessmen, Sheldon thought. Rotarians in uniform, that’s what they were.”

One of many fascinating and insightful observations by the author is that, far from what one might expect, the war brings with it a degree of simplification: the simplification of merely following orders. So, during the patrol, Sheldon’s “private universe” becomes “a long thin strip of light, seven men wide, with White Farm at the end of it, and all he had to do for the present was to get there”.

Patrol is not just a moving and compelling account of the experience of war but contains some fine writing. I was particularly struck by the section in which Sheldon recalls his experience of an attack on an enemy outpost, the skirmish in which he was wounded. It’s described in short, often single word sentences vividly conjuring up the noise and confusion of battle. I also loved this description of the experience of coming back to base after a night operation. “To a returning patrol first light is sacred and miraculous: not the dawning of a new day but of a new life.”

The final scenes in the book left me with an even stronger sense of the futility of war and the waste of human life it represents. In his introduction, Alan Jeffreys notes that the author’s wife, Sheila Howarth, wrote, ‘I believe in Patrol he was writing his epitaph’. If that is so, the book is a fitting epitaph to a courageous man, and to many others like him.

In three words: Compelling, immersive, authentic

Try something similar: Eight Hours From England by Anthony Quayle

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About the Author

Frederick Majdalany (1913 – 1967) was the son of a Manchester-based Lebanese family. His original first name was Fareed, which he changed to Frederick or Fred. He was also known as ‘Maj’. He worked as a journalist, drama critic and theatre publicist pre-war. He volunteered in 1939 and was commissioned into the 2nd Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers in 1940, serving in North Africa and Italy. He was wounded at the Battle of Medjez-el-Bab, returning to the battalion five weeks later with the rank of captain, was later promoted to major, and commanded a company. His unit landed at Taranto in September 1943 where he was awarded the Military Cross during the Italian campaign.

In October 1944 he returned home to become an instructor at an officer cadet training unit, which he later commanded, until demobilization in November 1945. After the war Majdalany resumed his career as a journalist and also worked for the BBC on historical scripts for radio and TV. He published novels and military histories, all of which were very well received. He was also involved with International PEN.

Fred Majdalany suffered a stroke in 1957 and died ten years later.