Lucien's Story: A Memoir

By Aleksandra Kroh

Book Overview

It may have been coincidental that on a walk in the 14th arrondissement would lead Lucien Duckstein to recall his Paris childhood and his removal at age eleven to Drancy and later to Bergen-Belsen. This powerful memoir rings with truth, and Lucien's technique of recounting the events of the past, while acknowledging their effect upon the present and future, makes this account a testament to the personal and psychological costs of the Holocaust.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810160218
• ISBN13: 9780810160217
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Marlboro Press
• Length: 68 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

As dry and poignant as the skeleton's bones

A memoir -- A gateway into the world of Lucien leads the reader through the tunnels of his mind as the horrors of the past ricochet into the present. Without sentimentality this story changes the awareness of even the most knowledgeable reader. The present is honed by these echoes of the past. Beautifully, albeit adroitly, written, the bones of his experience are clean, sparse and strong. We are helped to understand the unimaginable

As dry and poignant as the skeleton's bones

A memoir -- A gateway into the world of Lucien leads the reader through the tunnels of his mind as the horrors of the past ricochet into the present. Without sentimentality this story changes the awareness of even the most knowledgeable reader. The presnt is honed by these echoes of the past. Beautifully, albeit adroitly, written, the bones of this experience are clean, sparse and strong. We are helped to understand the unimaginable

brief but compelling story of a child's attempt to deal with the unthinkable

This is the story of Lucien Duckstein, an 11 year old boy in Paris who is deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with his mother because they are Jewish. It is also the story of Lucien Duckstein, a sixty year old scientist who eventually comes to deal with the experiences he underwent in Bergen-Belsen and the Drancy internment camp. He explores the price those childhood experiences exacted in his adulthood, especially in his dealings with his wife, children, family and the outside world. He acknowledges the cost of having created a persona which could survive life in the camps. His language is sparse, but eloquent and his pain is evident in the simplicity of his words. This is a short (60page), volume that is uncluttered by the irrelevant, that flows from the start and is stark and frightening in it's descriptions of what it was like to be a French Jew in Paris and later. His use of the present to play off against the past merely highlights the horrors that he experience