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. … 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.
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“Fragments of Isabella” is an Auschwitz memoir which offers an intimate look into one of the darkest parts of the twentieth-century history. Each chapter is a short fragment of a certain pivotal point in Isabella’s life: the deportation, the ghetto, the train, the camp itself. Despite those chapters being short, I was amazed at the author’s ability to put so many powerful emotions into so few words that I needed to catch a break from time to time simply because it was too difficult to continue. Her prose is so imaginary, so brutally vivid that one can’t help but find themselves reliving the events together with the author, suffering along with her, losing family members one by one, encountering the ugliest evil and the most inspiring instances of personal sacrifice, and finally finding the salvation which had nearly evaded them during the last of death marches. It’s an extremely powerful book and a true must-read for everyone, not just people interested in history. It will touch the deepest chords of your soul and leave you breathless after the last page is turned. I really can’t recommend it highly enough!
Being a true story, it was very tragic, but shows the power of survival with family members.
Excellent book. Well written. Hard to put down.
Could not put it down read it in its entirety in one sitting. Eloquent disturbing heart wrenching.
A very emotional book about the fates of her family members at the hands of the Nazis and insensitivity of most of their non-Jewish neighbors
A short book but has so much feeling in it. I couldn’t put it down till i was done. A Holocaust’s survivors story but so much more.
Something everyone should read.
A story that needs to be told, but a little disjointed
While I found the story compelling and heartbreaking I thought it was disjointed.
I would not recommend this book.
The author writes with gripping word pictures. I was moved greatly by this book. It is a fast read but the message lingers long after.
This is a true account of a concentration camp survivor. This woman survived with her sisters because they were young, and were taken from Hungary in 1944, thus, the war would last for one more year. At this point, Himmler was starting to back pedal what was done in the camps so he could make a deal with the Allies. Unfortunately, Eichmann was of a different mind, and put his efforts into killing the Hungarian Jews. This was a terrible, avoidable tragedy. The book is well written, and poses some interesting points, such as “when we were marched through a small German town, none of the inhabitants saw me, they would swear after the war”.
This is a good read with a heartbreaking story of family love, loyalty and the strength of human spirit. It is an amazing account of endurance and courage in spite of horrific brutality not to mention starvation and bitter cold. These sisters fought for life and kept each other going in the most difficult times and came out the other side. Just amazing!
I found it very interesting. I have an interest in what happened in that period in our history.
The book wasn’t what I expected, which was a story of the survival of Isabella Leitner, a Jewish girl in Hungary, after being sent to Auschwitz.
The writing is rather minimalist, which for me adds to the impact of Isabella’s story. To tell it as starkly as she saw it makes it hit harder. She and her sisters were put through the horrors of these Nazi camps, and one wonders how any of them made it out alive, much less with their sanity intact.
It is difficult to read these biographies but it is most important that we do.
Fast read. Short. Important. Amazing.
“Fragments of Isabella” was different than most World War II Holocaust books I’ve read. I’ve read several true stories of survivors of the inhumane, disgusting acts of the Nazis to the Jews. This book made me feel different. I felt both the author’s hope and despair, strength and sadness, and grief and healing. I was very moved by the palpable emotions she shared with us, her readers. This will be one of those books that will stay with me forever.
We never know how it is to live the life she lived or how we would act afterwards.
This book is about a holicost serviver. It is very good
What a horrific story. She and her sisters went through hell. God bless them and all the victims of those insane monsters.
Too choppy.