Review: An Angel From Auschwitz by R.S. Brynin

With an epic novelistic turn and a solid grasp of history, R.S. Brynin details an authoritative panorama of failed humanity at its most base stretching upward to its finest heights on a broad canvas of war and unthinkable brutality. A chronicle of desperation, conviction, courage and the struggle for survival in a lethal landscape of formidable fanaticism and viral hatred. 

He has painted a canvass of dialogue revealing both the grim emotional desperation and the humanity of his protagonists with dialogue both credible and heart gripping through the vagaries of fate that brings the reader into the orbit of deranged humanity -- extending into the future of hope.

From the landscape of war to the mindscape of survival this is a wide-ranging journey of human depravity countered by the equally human will to live with entitled dignity. 

The novel introduces the reader to a cast that includes the serpents of destruction driven by the venom of hate, and the victims whose fate the world ignored as an inconvenience. A book infused with character development of complex dimensions faced with a psychological, deeply emotional primal drive for tribal survival.

An informed historical narrative through skilled, imaginative and entirely natural interaction between the novel's enduring characters. The hatefully cynical, intractable belief of the Nazi Final Solution that a segment of humanity should be exterminated in favour of purifying the human race -- balanced against the confused bewilderment and outrage powering the victims' resolve to survive at all costs.

At a time when history drew a dark shield over civilizational enlightenment to re-introduce barbarity on a massive scale of destruction and annihilation of liberty and life, the author lifts a corner of that blind obscuring the light of reason with its deepest delve into the night of genocide to offer hope for the survival of human sanity.

This is a story for the ages, deftly handled in an intimate acquaintance with victims who refuse to submit to the tyranny of humiliation, degradation, terror and death, and who resolve to fight back as best they can in a crisis of endurance. Through the medium of this novel and its extensive cast of perpetrators and victims whose lives have been eviscerated, the mettle of the human character is tested and found equal to the task.