Book Review -- "The Last Jew of Treblinka"

5 of of 5 Stars

An incredibly sobering, but important, book.

Many concentration camps were work camps, where Jews and other political prisoners were made to work literally to death.  Not all concentration camps had ovens, crematoria, gas chambers.  Treblinka, however, was made as a death camp with one main purpose -- killing.

Very few people survived Treblinka.  There are many memoirs of Auschwitz or Buchenwald, but Treblinka killed almost every single person who passed their gates.  This is the memoir of Chil Raichman, a survivor who worked in Camp 2, the camp where crematoria and burial pit workers tried to work and tried to stay alive.

I thought I'd read it all, but I clearly haven't.  This short memoir doesn't go into Chil's background or after-liberation life at all, speaking only to the year he worked in Treblinka.  The matter-of-fact way he tells his story is chilling.  The fact that he survived is miraculous.

We cannot let anything like this happen again.

Lori Anderson creates jewelry for her web site, Lori Anderson Designs, and wrote the blog An Artist's Year Off.  She is the creator of the Bead Soup Blog Party.

Book Review -- "The Night Circus" by Erin Morgenstern

Five out of Five Stars

This has to be one of the best books I've read all year.

Magical, mysterious, and creative, this is Erin Morgenstern's first book -- and I can't WAIT for anything else she writes.

The premise -- circus tents show up with no previous announcement.  They can appear anywhere in the word.  Rather than the colorful tents of the circus we know as kids, these circus tents are striped in black and white.  Tent after tent follows a winding path through the circus, and where you may have seen one thing one day, you might find something else later.

Oh -- and the circus is only open at night.

The characters are richly developed, but the main characters, Celia and Marco, are pitted against each other in a competition whose outcome is nebulous and until the end, not really known.  At first, the two have no idea who their opponent is, but as it begins to dawn on them, they also realize they're falling in love.

So many magical things happen in this book -- it's emotional, exciting, mesmerizing, and suspenseful.  The ending will leave you spellbound.

Read this book!

Lori Anderson creates jewelry for her web site, Lori Anderson Designs, and wrote the blog An Artist's Year Off.  She's also a contributor to Art Bead Scene and is the creator of the Bead Soup Blog Party.