Joseph Weismann

nonfiction, historical-places-events, historical, France, family, friendship *****

When he is eighty, Joseph is made to see the good it will do for others to hear about the horror his life became in France in 1942. Born in France in 1931 to parents who lived in France after leaving a neighboring country twenty years earlier, he and his family were condemned by the Vichy government and Hitler because they were Jews not born in France. Think about it. What if you were herded into unsanitary and foodless arenas because of your religion and the fact that you or your parents were born in Wisconsin instead of, say, Texas. The conditions were horrible, parents separated from children who didn't know where parents were or that they, too, would be shipped off to the camps. Obviously Joseph escaped and suffered in other ways even after liberation, and much of that is related as well. This biography is excellent and most of it is written from the perspective of that young person. What a monumental task!
Equally monumental was the task faced by translator Richard Kutner in transforming the original French, complete with idioms from sixty years ago!
And don't forget how well J Clark Allison audio interpreted the writing without getting overly dramatic or doom and gloom. Fantastic!
I won the audio in a giveaway.
These things happened. Never Forget.… (meer)