Tag: non-fiction

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.

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The Last Secrets by John Buchan #BookReview

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About the Book

The Last Secrets is a detailed record of some of the main explorative achievements of the first two decades of the twentieth century and a fascinating glimpse into one the most exciting epochs for exploration.

Format: Hardcover (306 pages)               Publisher: Thomas Nelson & Sons
Publication date: January 1937 [1923]  Genre: NonFiction

Find The Last Secrets on Goodreads

My Review

My Buchan of the Month for May was The Last Secrets which was published in September 1923 by Nelson.  My edition of the book is from 1937.

Subtitled ‘The Final Mysteries of Exploration’, The Last Secrets contains eight accounts of recently achieved feats of exploration. These include the first entry by outsiders to the previously hidden Tibetan city of Lhasa and the exploration of the inaccessible Ruwenzori mountain range in east Africa which had come to be identified as the legendary Mountains of the Moon. Buchan describes the latter as having “no fellows on the globe” and as “extravagances of Nature, moulded without regard to human needs.” There are moments of wry humour such as in the account of the 1910 expedition to the interior of New Guinea led by Cecil Rawling (more of whom later). Forced to rely on surplus stores from Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, Buchan recounts how Rawling’s party experienced “the joys of bully-beef, pea-soup, and pickles under an equatorial sky”.

Buchan observes that early exploits were as much about finding trade routes and territorial acquisition as about geographical discovery for its own sake. He regrets what he sees as the tendency to once again prioritize the former over the latter. “The factors which have helped to make the modern world are mainly a desire for fame, a desire for knowledge, and a desire for riches; and woe betide the nation that forgets the first and second of these factors, and loses its soul in concentration upon the last of them.”

A Prince of the CaptivityAs I was reading the book, I found myself making connections between some of the stories and later novels by John Buchan. For example, the chapter detailing the first attempts to reach the North Pole brought to mind an early part of A Prince of the Captivity in which its hero sets out on a rescue mission to Iceland during a freezing winter. Incidentally, the chapter on the North Pole also refers to the efforts to discover the fate of the explorer Sir John Franklin who disappeared along with his two ships and their crew while on his last expedition to the Arctic in 1845. This forms part of the storyline of a book I recently read, The Canary Keeper by Clare Carson.

The chapter ‘The Holy Cities of Islam’, in which a Mr Wavell travels in disguise to Mecca and Medina, seemed like something out of Buchan’s Greenmantle. Indeed at one point, noting Wavell’s careful prior study of Muslim customs, Buchan observes, “It is on such small things that the efficacy of a disguise depends”; words that could surely have come from the lips of that master of different identities, Sandy Arbuthnot.

Unsurprisingly, the chapter devoted to the ill-fated attempts by Sir Ernest Shackleton, Captain Scott and others to reach the South Pole is the longest in the book. Buchan goes out of his way to acknowledge the achievement of the Norwegian Amundsen in being the first to reach the South Pole, beating Scott and his team by only a few days.

The ninth and final chapter of the book details the attempts by Mallory and others to reach the summit of Everest, a feat that was still be achieved at the time Buchan was writing and which, sadly, he never lived to see. It’s no surprise that Buchan included the attempted conquest of Mount Everest in the book.

Dedication The Last Secrets John BuchanAs I noted in my earlier post about the book, an expedition to Everest was one of John Buchan’s “cherished pipe-dreams”. He and Cecil Rawling, a friend of Buchan’s brother, Willie, had been planning an expedition to Everest but the outbreak of the First World War and Rawling’s own death in 1917 put an end to the plans, as did Buchan’s poor health once the war ended. The Last Secrets is dedicated to Cecil Rawling.

The Last Secrets is full of detail and clearly the product of much careful research. However, there are a couple of references to native peoples that represent very outdated and rather paternalistic points of view. Having said that, Buchan was an early supporter of the call for Mt. McKinley to revert to its original name of Denali. This finally happened only in 2015.

20200531_103838-1Despite the amount of detail, the book is immensely readable thanks to Buchan’s clear prose and obvious enthusiasm for his subject. There are wonderful and extremely helpful maps accompanying each chapter.

Clearly Buchan believed there was an intrinsic virtue and heroism associated with feats of exploration, observing, “A nation which is without its heroes is in a sad plight”. Indeed.

My Buchan of the Month for June is Homilies and Recreations, a collection of essays published in 1926. Look out for my blog post next week introducing the book and for my review later this month.

In three words: Detailed, well-researched, informative

Try something similar: A Book of Escapes and Hurried Journeys by John Buchan

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John BuchanAbout the Author

John Buchan (1875 – 1940) was an author, poet, lawyer, publisher, journalist, war correspondent, Member of Parliament, University Chancellor, keen angler and family man.  He was ennobled and, as Lord Tweedsmuir, became Governor-General of Canada.  In this role, he signed Canada’s entry into the Second World War.   Nowadays he is probably best known – maybe only known – as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps.  However, in his lifetime he published over 100 books: fiction, poetry, short stories, biographies, memoirs and history.

You can find out more about John Buchan, his life and literary output by visiting The John Buchan Society website.

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