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This book is of great personal interest since my mother was a slave laborer in the Riga Ghetto during WWII after her family was forcibly moved from their home in Germany and "relocated" to Latvia. The author was an engineer and the writing is competent and clear. I recommend this book for people interested in learning about the Riga Ghetto or interested in personal narratives of WWII.
Recommended reading: "City of Life, City of Death" by Max Michelson (Sept 2004, 171 pages) is a dichotomous accounting of life in Riga, Latvia. The author, a survivor of the Riga Ghetto (and Kaiserwald, Stutthof and Magdeburg concentration camps) essentially divides his book into two phases; life before and after the Nazi invasion of the Baltics and Soviet Russia (June, 1941).Michelson draws in and endears the reader to his parents, cousins and friends painting a near idyllic picture of the pre-...
I thought this memoir only average, and quite self-indulgent. Fully half of the book is about the author's genealogy and his life before the war began. He devoted a chapter to each of his relatives. This section should have been cut by two-thirds. Things got more exciting when he finally started talking about the Nazi invasion, but I wish he would have written more about his feelings during that time and how he was able to survive when so many died. Meh.