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    Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz
    Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz
    Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz

    By Isabella Leitner and Irving A. Leitner

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The deeply moving, Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir of a young Jewish woman’s imprisonment at the Auschwitz death camp.

    In 1944, on the morning of her twenty-third birthday, Isabella Leitner and her family were deported to Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp. There, she and her siblings relied on one another’s love and support to remain hopeful in the midst of the great evil surrounding them.

    In Fragments of Isabella, Leitner reveals a glimpse of humanity in a world of darkness. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as “a celebration of the strength of the human spirit as it passes through fire,” this powerful and luminous Pulitzer Prize–nominated memoir, written thirty years after the author’s escape from the Nazis, has become a classic of holocaust literature and human survival.
     
    This ebook features rare images from the author’s estate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781504036665
    Author

    Isabella Leitner

    Isabella Leitner (1921–2009) was born and raised in Hungary. On her twenty-third birthday, she was deported to Auschwitz along with her mother, four sisters, and brother, an experience she wrote about in her acclaimed memoir Fragments of Isabella, which was published in 1978 and named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. A motion picture based on the book was produced by the Abbey Theater in Ireland. In 1945, the author immigrated to the United States and married Irving A. Leitner, who served in a US Air Force bomber squadron during World War II. The mother of two sons, Peter and Richard, whom she considered “her greatest victory over Hitler,” Leitner also wrote Saving the Fragments: From Auschwitz to New York and The Big Lie: A True Story.  

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    Reviews for Fragments of Isabella

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    • 4/5
      Fragments of Isabella: A memoir of Auschwitz by Isabella Leitner and Irving Leitner (editor)
      (Scribed). As a young woman, Isabella was transferred to Auschwitz from a ghetto with her mother, her sisters, and her brother. Her mother, brother, and two of her sisters died in Auschwitz. Isabella and two of her sisters survived. What makes Isabellas story unique is that it’s not told in straightforward almost historical prose. Her story is told in the way she remembers what happened, in disjointed burst of memories. It at times makes the book hard to follow but it adds to the understanding of what it must be like to actually live with the memories. Good book and she was very brave to write it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is a fairly short novel(ette) that can be easily read in about 90-minutes to 2-hours. Like many of the authors who have survived the Holocaust, Isabella's story was thrown back into her face, and this great writer was accused of falsifying her own history. Isabella's youth was spent, was killed in Auschwitz, along with many family members. But she lived. Along with two of her sisters, living day to day with the mantra "I will live, I will live!" She starved. She froze. And Germans used her poor body as a slave to their machinations. If you want to know another story from the Holocaust, Isabella's is one to read. On the same level as the Anne Frank Diaries, Isabella's story will outrage you, bring you to tears, and at times make you smile on the young girl as she simply tries to survive for her sisters. I heartily recommend this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      When I was asked if I would like to read Fragments of Isabella, I agreed. Auschwitz was one of the worst concentration camps of the Holocaust, so to be able to read a memoir from someone who was there would be, I knew, raw and emotional. It is a short read, with short chapters, and even for the most part, short and concise sentences. This makes for a one-day read that is overall, powerful and touching. Josef Mengele is mentioned a few times, and I was astonished that the author actually came into contact with him. Of course it wouldn't be impossible, I just haven't read a memoir yet where the author spoke about actually being in close proximity with Mengele. There was just such indifference towards him, which was odd considering how he was notorious for being truly awful—even nicknamed the “Angel of Death.” Leitner was one tough cookie. Irma Grese was also briefly talked about and how she would choose specific women to be punished, mainly based on how attractive they were to her. Because the chapters are so short, sometimes the book confused me as to where the characters were physically at, and the events take place so quickly that it's hard to wrap your head around what exactly is going on all the time. Most of the time you can regain your footing, brush yourself off, and realize what it is Leitner is describing. But a few times, you're still left lost. I admit, Isabella Leitner's writing was a bit hard for me to read at first. I was enjoying the story, but not her too-short sentences or what seemed to me like almost apathetic emotional responses to the situations at hand. Trust me though when I say you need to read just a few more chapters—or even one more chapter—and you will read what I and others have read and thanked Leitner in our hearts for sharing. What gripped me almost more than what happened in the camps to the Jews, was what happened outside and around them when they walked the streets and passed by everyone. Leitner says of this: “But the Germans never saw us. Ask them. They never saw us. Come to think of it, they really didn't.” One of the saddest quotes I found was Leitner telling herself, “...I don't know yet how people live, I know only how they die.” The author and so many of those members of the Holocaust had to watch their family members be murdered. Be burned right in front of them. Be shot down. So for Isabella to have survived—how wonderful! But how painful, to carry all those memories for the rest of her life.With that said, you must read what her husband has to say on her account in the epilogue.It can be a small and terrible world.*I received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A very short, fragmentary memoir of the author's experience in Auschwitz. Isabella, her four sisters, her brother and her mother were Hungarian Jews who were deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. (Their father was in America by then. He got papers for them to emigrate but they arrived too late.) The mother and the youngest child were gassed immediately and the brother separated from the girls. In brief, two-or-three-page vignettes, Isabella recounts her efforts to keep her sisters all together and help them all survive. An afterword by Isabella's husband describes their trips to Europe decades later, and her revulsion of being around German people or even hearing the German language.Many of these scenes are beautifully written and I think Holocaust lit junkies will enjoy this. It's so fragmentary, though, that the general reader who doesn't know all that much about Auschwitz or Nazi Europe would probably just find it confusing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is an unforgettable story and one that has stayed with me for over 20 years. Written as fragments of memory, Isabella is able to convey the terror, despair and desperation of Jews placed in concentration camps. It is an incredibly powerful story and one that brings the sweeping tragedy of the holocaust to a very person level.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the most powerful Holocaust memoirs I have ever read, Fragments of Isabella is a slender volume of distilled suffering - so beautifully written and utterly heartbreaking that the reader is transfixed, a witness incapable of turning away from these scenes of horror. I would compare it favorably to Elie Wiesel's Night, and cannot understand why it is not more widely known..."I died in May" writes Leitner, for it was on May 31, 1944 that the author (then Isabella Katz) and her family arrived at the death camp Auschwitz. Here Leitner's mother and thirteen-year-old sister Potyo were immediately sent to the gas chamber; and she, her brother Philip, and her sisters Chicha, Rachel (Regina) and Cipi were sentenced to hard labor.Told in brief vignettes, this memoir is a searing depiction of suffering and cruelty. But it is also a portrait of strength, and of the ties of love and loyalty between four sisters, who helped each other survive in unimaginable circumstances. The loss of Cipi, so close to liberation, was perhaps the most stunning blow of all, in a book of unbearable memories.Fragments of Isabella is stamped upon my own memory, like some sort of indelible marker, or mental scar that does not fade...I have only to see the cover to experience again that sensation of tight-chested desperation I felt when first reading it, at age eleven.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Fragments of Isabella - Isabella Leitner

    NEW YORK, MAY 1945

    Yesterday, what happened yesterday? Did you go to the movies? Did you have a date? What did he say? That he loves you? Did you see the new Garbo film? She was wearing a stunning cape. Her hair, I thought, was completely different and very becoming. Have you seen it? No? I haven’t. Yesterday … yesterday, May 29, 1944, we were deported.…

    Are the American girls really going to the movies? Do they have dates? Men tell them they love them, true or not. Their hair is long and blonde, high in the front and low in the back, like this and like that, and they are beautiful and ugly. Their clothes are light in the summer and they wear fur in the winter—they mustn’t catch cold. They wear stockings, ride in automobiles, wear wristwatches and necklaces, and they are colorful and perfumed. They are healthy. They are living. Incredible!

    Was it only a year ago? Or a century?… Our heads are shaved. We look like neither boys nor girls. We haven’t menstruated for a long time. We have diarrhea. No, not diarrhea—typhus. Summer and winter we have but one type of clothing. Its name is rag. Not an inch of it without a hole. Our shoulders are exposed. The rain is pouring on our skeletal bodies. The lice are having an orgy in our armpits, their favorite spots. Their bloodsucking, the irritation, their busy scurrying, give the illusion of warmth. We’re hot at least under our armpits, while our bodies are shivering.

    MAY 28, 1944–MORNING

    It is Sunday, May 28th, my birthday, and I am celebrating, packing for the big journey, mumbling to myself with bitter laughter—tomorrow is deportation. The laughter is too bitter, the body too tired, the soul trying to still the infinite rage. My skull seems to be ripping apart, trying to organize, to comprehend what cannot be comprehended. Deportation? What is it like?

    A youthful SS man, with the authority, might, and terror of the whole German army in his voice, has just informed us that we are to rise at 4 A.M. sharp for the journey. Anyone not up at 4 A.M. will get a Kugel (bullet).

    A bullet simply for not getting up? What is happening here? The ghetto suddenly seems beautiful. I want to celebrate my birthday for all the days to come in this heaven. God, please let us stay here. Show us you are merciful. If my senses are accurate, this is the last paradise we will ever know. Please let us stay in this heavenly hell forever. Amen. We want nothing—nothing, just to stay in the ghetto. We are not crowded, we are not hungry, we are not miserable, we are happy. Dear ghetto, we love you; don’t let us leave. We were wrong to complain, we never meant it.

    We’re tightly packed in the ghetto, but that must be a fine way to live in comparison to deportation. Did God take leave of his senses? Something terrible is coming. Or is it only me? Am I mad? There are seven of us in nine feet of space. Let them put fourteen together, twenty-eight. We will sleep on top of each other. We will get up at 3 A.M.—not 4—stand in line for ten hours. Anything. Anything. Just let our family stay together. Together we will endure death. Even life.

    MAY 28, 1944–AFTERNOON

    We are no longer being guarded only by the Hungarian gendarmes. That duty has been taken over by the SS, for tomorrow we are to be transported. From now on, the SS are to be the visible bosses.

    Before this day, Admiral Horthy’s gendarmes were the front men. Now they are what they always had been—the lackeys. Ever since childhood, I remembered them with terror in my heart. They were brutal, vicious—and anti-Semitic. Ordinary policemen, by comparison, are gentle and kind. But now, for the first time, the SS are to take charge.

    My mother looks at me, her birthday baby. My mother’s face, her eyes, cannot be described. From here on she keeps smiling. Her smile is full of pain. She knows that for her there is nothing beyond this. And she keeps smiling at me, and I can’t stand it. I am silently pleading with her: Stop smiling. I gaze at her tenderly and smile back.

    I would love to tell her that she should trust me, that I will live, endure. And she trusts me, but she doesn’t trust the Germans. She keeps smiling, and it is driving me mad, because deep inside I know she knows. I keep hearing her oft-made comment: Hitler will lose the war, but he’ll win against the Jews.

    And now an SS man is here, spick-and-span, with a dog, a silver pistol, and a whip. And he is all of sixteen years old. On his list appears the name of every Jew in the ghetto. The streets are bulging with Jews, because Kisvárda, a little town, has to accommodate all the Jews of the neighboring villages. The SS do not have to pluck out every Jew from every hamlet. That work has already been done by the gendarmes. The Jews are now here. All the SS have to do is to send them on their way to the ovens.

    The Jews are lined up in the streets. And now the sixteen-year-old SS begins to read the names. Those called form a group opposite us. Teresa Katz, he calls—my mother. She steps forward. My brother, my sisters, and I watch her closely. (My father is in America trying to obtain immigration papers for his wife and children, trying to save them before Hitler devours them.) My mother heads toward the group.

    Now the SS man moves toward my mother. He raises his whip and, for no reason at all, lashes out at her.

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