ספר מעולה
הביקורת נכתבה ביום ראשון, 5 ביוני, 2011
ע"י Disraeli
ע"י Disraeli
"Engrossing" is the one word I would use to describe Mila 18. Once I was into it, I could barely put it down long enough to tend to other necessary things... like eating and sleeping. I lost weight! I became skittish! And not since reading War and Peace have I felt so riveted to a story. Uris digs down deep into the soul-stretching time of Nazi terror in Eastern Europe, a period of history I am always interested in learning more about. His book is filled with non-stop action, it is tense, it is nerve-wracking. There is a scene where several of the ghetto prisoners are in a desperate scramble along an angled rooftop, and I felt that if one of them had slipped I surely would've fallen off my chair and landed with him amidst the ravenous guards in the courtyard down below. Their reward for NOT falling is to be trapped end-to-end along a single beam in the rafters of that same rooftop for more than a day and a night, unable to make a sound beyond breathing, while rats knaw on them, and the guards furiously stomp about just above their heads, longing to exterminate them as though they were rabid animals. While plumbing these almost unbelievable (but sadly, too true) depths of human cruelty, hatred, and injustice against fellow man, this book also scales the heights of human courage, loyalty, and dignity. And running throughout Mila 18 is the interwoven story of romantic love during perilous times. Because of the peril, some loves are lost and they die; others are found, they are born and they grow.
As the resistance forces in the ghetto begin to realize that they cannot stave off the Nazi onslaught indefinitely, the desperation increases... and one man on the other side of the wall (the reporter Christopher de Monti) willingly enters the ghetto. The woman he loves is there. But even beyond this, ever since the Nazi Horst von Epp ridiculed Chris by telling him that he represented "all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence" Chris has known that he has a historical role to play inside the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto. He risks his life to become the one who will retrieve and publish the meticulous hidden journals that have been kept up by the chronicler Alexander Brandel. In this he succeeds.
It is a remarkable fact of history that while all of Poland fell to the Nazi power in less than a month, this rabble army of Jewish resistance within the ghetto (lacking any decent weapon) held at bay the world's mightiest military power for 42 days and 42 nights! In the end, there are precious few survivors of Mila 18. But this is not a book about death. It is a book about life.
3 קוראים אהבו את הביקורת
3 הקוראים שאהבו את הביקורת
