Silvie - Softcover

This highly literary and often engagingly witty new addition to the culturally vital genre of the Holocaust memoir details Grohs-Martin's life from her middle-class, secular Jewish childhood in Vienna in the late 1930s to her liberation from Ravensbr?ck concentration camp in 1945. In engrossing, novelistic prose, Grohs-Martin describes the shock of her first encounter with Germany's racist policies, when she lost a featured role in a German film at the age of 15; her success as a performer in Amsterdam's famed Hollandsche Schouwburg until the Nazis began deportations of Jews; her work to rescue Jewish children; and her arrest, which led first to Malin and then Auschwitz. Grohs-Martin's theatricality comes through in her brave actions and determination not to capitulate to the Nazis, and in her prose style, which is filled with vivid flourishes and incidents (e.g., she describes a female camp inmate at a desk job powdering her nose when asking questions and a decorated Christmas tree in the middle of Ravensbr?ck). Grohs-Martin, who is featured on the Stephen Spielberg-produced CD-ROM Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, offers important insights into both the treatment of women in the camps (a theme now more frequently explored in Holocaust literature) as well as another confirmation of the will to human dignity and survival. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)
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To have survived the Holocaust is enough, but to have come through with one's spirit intact and one's capacity to remember undiminished is beyond imagining. Silvia Grohs-Martin's story begins with her budding career on Europe's theater and light opera stage and her reluctance to acknowledge the signs of the horror about to be unleashed. She landed in the Netherlands just as World War II was getting underway, and she passed its first years restricted to performing in the Jewish theater in Amsterdam. The Dutch resistance helped her hide, but eventually the Nazis sent her to the first of a series of camps, Malines. From there she was progressively deported through Birkenau (her journey past Auschwitz's crematoria is a soul-shaking moment in her narrative) and ended up in Ravensbruck as slave labor for Siemens. Freed prior to war's end, Grohs-Martin still had to endure bombardment before escaping into Denmark. The author's acting background gives her a good eye both for character and for physical detail, and this distinguishes her memoir. Mark Knoblauch
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