Review Cry Sanctuary Carole Kulikowski

Cry Sanctuary is one of the few books about Holocaust survivors which delves into the early stages of the Nazi persecution in Germany. I felt a deep respect for this work because it is the most poignant memoir about this tragic historical age.

The book tells about the true story of Anna Lang, who was born in Berlin in 1929 with a facial deformity.

She was much loved by her parents, but witnessed what it meant to be born in Germany when Hitler came to the power. The Nazis, in fact, didn’t persecute only the Jews, but also every people that they considered different from their wicked ideology of perfection.

The author described the childhood of Anna, her life with her beloved family and the time at school. We are in Germany, a Country completely worn out by the Great Depression of 1929.

Unemployment and poverty are widespread and massive. Husbands, wives, and even little boys are forced to sell themselves to earn a living. Prostitution and robberies are the rule in this dark and desperate historical time.

The frailest persons, instead, commit suicide. Many of them jump from their balcony. And it is just in this historical time that Germans deliver all their hopes and expectations to Hitler and his powerful entourage, unaware about all would be happened shortly after.

Shortly after, German disabled people, including Anna, are included in a Nazi program called “Mercy Killings”. Infants, toddlers, teenagers, adults with any type of mental or physical disability are snatched from their families and taken to secretive places that marked the beginning of Holocaust.

Disabled people like Anna Land, born with a cleft lip, were considered “Life Unworthy to Live” for the Nazis. Sorry, but even now, while I am writing this book review, my eyes fill with tears. Tears slipped along my cheek during the reading of the book, also.

The protagonist, Anna, never had the strength to write her story, when she was younger. The voice of this survivor speaks through the narration of Carole Kulikowski, born with the same facial problem of Anna.

However, the style is authentic and heartfelt, emotions are palpable, the dialogues are well written in perfect English and give us a comprehensive overview about the economic and political condition of Germany and Europe in the years preceding the Second World War.

I can’t tell about the entire plot, but I can affirm the book is worthy to be read and remembered. It contains interesting clues about the origin of the Nazism and many implicit questions about the faults of this horrible government.

The answers are in the dialogues. They seem the ones of a war movie, but are the pure reality. I perceived all the distress of the honest and helpless Germans and the coldness of the evil Germans.

There is a repeated sentence indicating this opposite mood: “I did only my duty” said by a Nazi nurse who killed disabled children with lethal injections and there is the bravery and cowardice of the SS soldier who helps a girl secretly escape because she must understand he has a wife and a child to take care of, as if the salvation of a girl was a crime.

In this book, there is an important piece of the history of the world about an issue for long overlooked: the extermination of disabled people. “Do you know – the author said – why there aren’t books written by holocaust disabled survivors? Because the most of them were killed. I survived!”. And, thankfully, we are here to read you!