Jeremy DronfieldRezensionen

Gr 7 Up—This biography portrays the astonishing survival story of Jewish teenager Fritz and his father, determined
to stay together in the Nazi death camps. Intertwined is the story of younger brother Kurt, who escaped to the United
States. With elegant prose, this is a heart-pounding read of steadfast devotion in the face of almost certain death

Synergy: The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II. This genocide occurred between 1941 and 1945 across German-occupied Europe. Although primarily focused on the Jewish population, mass-killings of other relatively small, targeted populations also occurred during the Holocaust era.

Read the three recently published books for youth, then learn more at the websites:

THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED HIS FATHER INTO AUSCHWITZ by Jeremy Dronfield is a work of nonfiction narrative adapted for young readers. Based on primary resources including a diary and interviews, readers learn about the challenges faced by two brothers who experienced the Holocaust very differently. ARC courtesy of Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

HARBORING HOPE by Susan Hood tells the true story of Henny Sinding who saved Danish Jews during the Holocaust. Written for middle grade and young adult readers, the nonfiction novel-in-verse shares the essential role of resistance fighters during Germany’s occupation of Denmark. The book includes primary sources, photographs, and additional information to extend the experience. ARC courtesy of HarperCollins.

QUESTIONS I AM ASKED ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST by Hedi Fried is a young reader’s edition of an autobiographical text for adults. The book is organized around dozens of questions that provide young people with unique insights into the challenges this Auschwtiz survivor faced during and after the Holocaust. The book concludes with background information and context. ARC courtesy of Scribble US, an imprint of Ingram Publisher Services.

The HOLOCAUST ENCYCLOPEDIA is a reference database from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This searchable resource provides access to thousands of articles and primary source documents.

To search the database, go to https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/.

YAD VASHEM: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center is a website sharing information about the Holocaust, digital collections, and a database of victims.

To explore the website, go to https://www.yadvashem.org/.

266-1

Carol Minnich's Father....½

This true story of the behind the lines heroism of an Air Force Captain called to an unfamiliar and highly dangerous duty made for a good read. This historical fiction accounting of the strained relationship between the US and the USSR demonstrates exactly what it was that made us so different from the Soviets: respect for life.
I found the book interesting, engaging, enlightening and an altogether good read.

Full review can be found on my blog: https://suspensebookreviews.home.blog/2021/04/27/the-boy-who-followed-his-father...

A unique holocaust story

A true and moving story of a father and son and their bond through the most horrible event of our lifetime. It's a unique story and every word of it is true. Told with brutal honesty and emotion, you will come to ask yourself how they endured what they did. Was it because they were together? Read it and you decide.

Beautiful story of one of the millions of families caught up in the horror of the nazis' murderous rampage during WWII. Gustav Kleinmann was a good husband, father of 4, and a kind man. He loved and fought for Austria, twice suffering injuries. But that didn't help when the nazis came for him and his oldest son Fritz. His wife, Tini expended much effort trying to get her children out of the country, and managed to send the oldest, Edith to England, and later her youngest to the US.

Gustav and Fritz spent nearly 6 years in multiple concentration camps as slave labor to the nazi machine of war. Together with their wits and much love.they were able to support each other despite back-breaking work, beatings, starvation, cold, and disease. Gustav kept a small notebook of significant events and his feelings which would years later become the foundation of The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz.

Reading about Gustav's naive optimism, and the fact that father and son were able to remain together for so long is captivating. Book should be read to learn how this one family fared.

Vienna, ottobre 1939. Gustav Kleinmann, un tappezziere ebreo, e il quindicenne Fritz, suo figlio, vengono arrestati dalla Gestapo, caricati su un vagone merci e deportati a Buchenwald, in Germania. Picchiati, ridotti alla fame, costretti ai lavori forzati per costruire il campo stesso in cui sono tenuti prigionieri, riescono miracolosamente a sopravvivere alla brutalità nazista. Finché, tre anni dopo, Gustav non viene inserito nella lista dei prigionieri che saranno mandati ad Auschwitz. Per Fritz è uno shock senza precedenti. Da tempo circolano voci inquietanti su quel lager e sulle sue speciali camere a gas dove si possono uccidere centinaia di persone alla volta. Il trasferimento laggiù significa una cosa sola... Eppure l'idea di separarsi dal padre non lo sfiora neppure. I compagni di prigionia gli dicono di dimenticarsi di lui, se vuole vivere, ma Fritz si rifiuta di ascoltarli e insiste per accompagnarlo, pur sapendo che li aspettano altri anni di orrori e sofferenze, se possibile ancor più terribili. Ma a tenerli in vita, ancora una volta, saranno l'amore e un'incrollabile speranza nel futuro. Basato sul diario di Gustav - un diario segreto di cui nemmeno suo figlio era a conoscenza - e sulle testimonianze dirette di parenti, amici e altri sopravvissuti, "Il ragazzo che decise di seguire suo padre ad Auschwitz" non è soltanto la storia di un legame, quello tra padre e figlio, che si è rivelato più forte della macchina dell'odio che ha cercato di schiacciarli. È anche una testimonianza di coraggio e di resilienza, e un ritratto lucido e vivido del meglio e del peggio della natura umana. (fonte: Ibs)

Wow!! This man is a hero... I don't use that word often, but in this case it is true. Not only did he fly bombers in WWII, but once her reached his 35 flights he was asked to do so much more. More than he was prepared for. He was able to get hundreds of POW's back home to their families. Hero!!

This true story of the behind the lines heroism of an Air Force Captain called to an unfamiliar and highly dangerous duty made for a good read. This historical fiction accounting of the strained relationship between the US and the USSR demonstrates exactly what it was that made us so different from the Soviets: respect for life.
I found the book interesting, engaging, enlightening and an altogether good read.

Crying is not something a non-fiction book evokes in me. The horrors of Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps is enough to drive one to tears. But Jeremy Dronfield’s writing is as compelling and moving as a novel.

This is the story of Gustav Kleinmann and his son, Fritz. Gustav was a decorated soldier who had fought for Germany’s ally, Austria, in World War One. Gustav and one of his sons, Fritz, were arrested in 1938 for being Jewish. They’d been betrayed by neighbours.

Gustav kept a diary throughout the five years he and Fritz were incarcerated. The Nazi’s monstrous murderous and mendacious behaviour contrasts with the Kleinmanns’ steadfast resistance which is inspiring.

They were sent separately to the Buchenwald concentration camp where they were reunited. A fluke of fate had Fritz stripped of his star, that denoted Jewish prisoners. His sudden change of status to Aryan is an astonishing act of hypocrisy that reveals the insanity of the Nazi’s idiotic racist ideology.

This is a story of horror but also hope and testament to extraordinary human endurance. And it’s the story of love and loyalty. But it’s also the story of what can happen when power is unchecked and where what starts as vilifying those different to us can lead.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in where humanity’s future and for those interested in 20th century history. Jeremy Dronfield has honoured Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann in a fitting and compelling way. We must never forget.

Harrowing. Not to be read if depressed !

As the Red Army advanced across Poland in 1945, thousands of freed Allied POWs - viewed by the Soviets as cowards or potential spies - were abandoned to wander the war-torn Eastern Front. In total secrecy, the OSS - wartime forerunner to the CIA - conceived an undercover mission to rescue them. The man they picked to undertake it was veteran Eighth Air Force bomber pilot Captain Robert Trimble.With little covert training, Trimble survived by wit, courage, and a determination to do some good in a terrible war. Alone, he faced up to the terrifying Soviet secret police and saved hundreds of lives, fighting his own battle against the trauma of war while finding his way home to his wife and child. Based on hours of testimony from his father, Beyond the Call is written by Trimble's son and by British historian Jeremy Dronfield. It is a filmic, inspiring story of a hitherto unknown true hero.

This is a powerful story that only came to light because of a son's persistent questions towards the end of the father's life. The Russian's disdain of their own, though well known, is always shocking.

reading the previous reviews posted here, I have to agree with them. This book really shows what Russia with Stalin was all about.

In the Postscript to his autobiography, H. G. Wells discusses when his long-running affair with the Baroness Moura Budberg (1891-1974) should have come on an end. He had met Moura in Russia, while visiting the writer Maxim Gorky. Many years later, she and he were lovers, and he had proposed marriage after the death of his second wife-- which she rejected. She also refused to come back to Russia with him, saying it was impossible but refusing to elaborate. When Wells went to Russia, with his son Gip instead, Wells was chatting with Gorky and his interpreter. Wells said something about how Moura couldn't be there, and the interpreter said it was a shame, because Wells had just missed her-- she'd been by the previous week. And, indeed, had been in Russia multiple times in recent years.

It's a sort of lurching moment: Wells's world drops away from him. The woman he was in love with enough to propose marriage to (and remember, Wells slept with lots of women) had been systematically lying to him for years. Wells can't take it, especially when she can't or won't explain, and he tries to break up with her. Except that every time she comes back into his life, he accepts her again. The end of the Postscript is a sporadically updated diary from the last decade of Wells's life, and Moura keeps on returning, and despite it all, Wells takes her back, and she was with him until the end of his life.

Wells died not knowing the whole truth of Moura Budberg, but I did a little research upon finishing the Postscript and discovered that she was a Russian spy, and that in 2015, there'd been a biography of her published, collating previously unaccessible letters and archives. It's a fascinating read.

Moura wasn't a spy in the James Bond sense-- she didn't go on undercover missions in foreign countries for the Kremlin. Rather, she was a popular social presence, and that was occasionally mined for the advantage of various parties with whom she needed to curry favor. Through her first husband's family, she had ties to the Germanophile Russian community; after the Bolshevik Revolution, she threw tons of parties for them and funneled information she acquired back to the Russian government. This is the kind of spying she did for most of her life.

Her life is pretty fascinating. She was a member of the upper classes, but managed to survive the rise of Communism by being useful to the new government-- not just through spying, as she became the lover of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the provisional Russian revolutionary government. McDonald and Dronfield paint a bleak and terrifying picture of revolutionary Russia, showing just how dangerous and desolate it was, as well as how politically fraught, as various political factions moved to consolidate power. Moura was both spied on by the Cheka (the counter-counterrevolutionary police) and spied for them.

Moura had connections to the U.K. from her youth, and fell in with Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British ambassador in Russia. (The U.K. recalled its embassy staff because it couldn't be seen to officially endorse Bolshevism, but it dearly needed Russia on its side against Germany, so Lockhart was sent to do what he could unofficially.) The two became lovers (even though both were married), just another of Moura's significant lovers, which would go on to include Wells and Gorky.*

McDonald and Dronfield cover all the extant facts about Moura, weaving them together into a compelling narrative that goes from the Revolutionary days (1916-19 get a whole 280 pages to themselves in a 340-page narrative), to the mysterious death of her husband, from her time spent selling Russian treasures abroad to obtain funds for the Soviet government to her second marriage (one of convenience, to an Estonian baron), from her time working for the BBC's propaganda department during World War II to her postwar career as a screenwriter and script doctor for Alexander Korda. There is a lot of information packed into here, extensively endnoted. I didn't always always read the endnotes, but they show that McDonald and Dronfield worked hard to sift through the many disparate accounts of Moura's life. (Moura being one of the most unreliable sources of all, given her propensity for storytelling.) Many of the endnotes are devoted to criticizing the previous biography of Moura, by Nina Berberova.

Once I adjusted to the density of the book (I always find biographies slow going, but in a sort of good way), I found the book incredibly interesting-- but I don't know that I understand Moura as a person. Perhaps no one can, given how prone she was to exaggeration, and how much she kept secret. What did she think of her time spying? The key moment, it seems to me, is almost completely skipped over, I assume because we just don't know anything about it. Suddenly she is spying on the Germanophiles for the Soviet government. But how was she recruited, and did she feel bad about the deceit this entailed? Moura never said, and neither did anyone else, so we have no way of knowing. There were similar moments like this throughout the book. At one point the authors speculate that she may have had a role in the death of her first husband... but there's no way we can ever really know, just as we will never know what role she played in the death of Gorky and its aftermath.

Moura kept so much of herself hidden-- except from Lockhart, for whom she threw a lavish Russian Orthodox funeral that no one else attended-- that even when we know what she did, it's difficult to know what she thought and felt of it. But that's a problem beyond McDonald and Dronfield's capacity to solve, I suspect, and not a dint on this well-researched tome.

* That isn't it for Moura's relations to famous folk: her niece/adopted daughter was the grandmother of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. from 2010 to 2015.

This is a biography of Maria (Moura) Ignatievna Zakrevskaya Benckendorff Budberg (ABT 1891 - 1974), a Russian aristocrat turned spy, who had affairs with various famous men:  British diplomat Bruce Lockhart, Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and British author H. G. Wells.  I'm not sure I'd describe her as "very dangerous," though, as it seems her "spying" consisted mostly of passing along gossip.

The subject is not a particularly likable woman, and between that and the excessive detail about her life, I had a hard time finishing this book.  It just didn't grab me.  However, the authors certainly did their research, with 43 pages of end notes supported by an eight-page bibliography (most of Budberg's letters to Lockhart, Gorky, and Wells had been preserved), and there is also an eight-page index.

© Amanda Pape - 2016

[I received this paperback through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.  It will be passed on to someone else to enjoy.]½

A densely rich book about a fascinating woman. As noted below, I too found myself wishing for a little bit more story-telling. A story about a female Russian spy should not be dry! Overall, it was an incredible read about a woman with an incredible ability to adapt and survive.

Picturesque account of a woman whose life will probably never be thoroughly documented. Effective portrait of the peril elites found themselves in during the Russian Revolution. I found myself wishing for story-telling that grabbed me a little more by the lapels.

As seems to frequently be the case, I think the author/publisher went a bit wild with the subtitle of this book. Maria (Moura) Budberg was born into an aristocratic Ukrainian family around 1891. She was very intelligent, reveled in being the center of attention, and was extremely charismatic, one of those people that others can't seem to help but like.

She certainly did some spying against Germany, set up as a bit of a double agent, during WWI, and did her share of whispering important tidbits down the line to the British throughout the years following the Russian revolution. However, facts about was she/wasn't she spying past the 1920s aren't really available. There was largely just an awful lot of rumor, some of which she created herself. Whatever hints we have, they are simply hints and there really isn't any hard evidence and there will likely never be any.

That being said, it was an interesting book because she was an interesting woman. While she destroyed all of her own papers, many letters she sent were kept and she was associated with many interesting people throughout her life, including Maxim Gorky and HG Wells. The book is well written and scrupulously end-noted. It took about a third of the way in to really grip me, but made for a good read.

Baroness Moura Budberg is a fascinating person, but I'd hesitate to call her "very dangerous". The book tells the story of a charming and accomplished woman who was the lover of politicians, diplomats, and literary figures. There is very little information about her espionage activities. There's some indication she passed intelligence to her British diplomat lover and there seems to be evidence that she spied for the Checka (Russian security agency), but the details are hazy. The authors might have been better off angling away from the spy aspect and just presenting her as she was, an intriguing and intelligent woman who influenced some important men in the early 20th century.

Baroness Moura Budberg was born Maria Zakrevsky, a child of the landed gentry in the Ukraine - her father was a high-level lawyer for the Tsar. Early on she decided she liked the life of wealth and nobility, so she married into a large Estonian aristocratic family - the von Benkendorfs. Moura, though, loved the life in Petrograd, and because she was raised by an English governess, became intimately involved in the affairs of British diplomats and spies, even finding her lifelong love there.

But in 1918, the Russian Revolution brought all this luxury and privilege crashing down. Moura survived, often by playing the British and the Soviets off each other, spying for each side against the other. And here her seductiveness came into play as she used her sexuality to integrate into powerful society. And basically, that's how she lived her life from then on - always with a lover to take care of her, always surrounded by society people, always trading on the information and gossip she gathered.

McDonald and Dronfield have written a pretty good biography of a very interesting woman found at the intersection of some very interesting times. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call her a "very dangerous woman" - though this is a quote from a British intelligence report on her later in life - as she seemed to trade in gossip and rumor more than anything else. (In fairness, there's some indication she may have had her hand in at least a few deaths, including her first husband.) But for a different sort of view on the events of the early to mid-20th century Europe, this is highly recommended.

Early Reviewer Book. “Spy, adventurer, charismatic seductress and mistress of two of the century’s greatest writers, the Russian aristocrat Baroness Moura Budberg was born in 1892 to indulgence, pleasure and selfishness.”
Great book even though I had a hard time keeping up with the Russian names which I guess is to be expected from this type of book. Loved reading about the real life characters and history in this place and time.