4 comments about Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi Occupied Hungary.

1. This book will add another view of the Holocaust that few have seen before. When I told my wife I was reading the book, she said, "Isn't it depressing?" Naturally, any book that comes close to so much unnecessary loss of life will make the reader sad, and that is appropriate. On balance, though, this book will probably leave you feeling more optimistic than you were about what can be accomplished by well-meaning people.

   Tivadar Soros was a Jewish lawyer in Budapest when the second world war began. Hungary had been an ally of Austria, so the Nazis did not occupy the country until March 19, 1944 as they began to fear betrayal behind their retreating forces in the Soviet Union and the Balkens. The country was liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. Unfortunately, the Nazis used this ten-month period to murder as many Hungarian Jews as possible.

   But Mr. Soros also had had an unusual experience earlier. He had been a prison of war in Siberia during World War I. From that experience, he had learned that those who are prominent are in danger from totalitarianism, after seeing the prisoners' represenative shot to terrify the prisoners. Mr. Soros had been offered that "honor" just recently and had declined. He soon escaped from the prison camp, and had a most difficult time getting back to Hungary through the midst of the Russian Revolution. Where he had been idealistic and vocal before World War I, he came back determined to enjoy each day as though it might be his last. This exasperated his wife, who knew he could accomplish more.

   This perspective served him well when the Nazi occupation arrived. As in other countries, the Nazis relied on Jews to follow orders. There was a Jewish Council whose families were exempt from the deportations who helped organize others into the death camps and ghettos. Many people voluntarily wore the yellow star. Wanting to cut off the potential leaders, one of the first groups being rounded up were lawyers. This was being done in alphabetical order, so Mr. Soros had a little time to prepare. Rather than complying (as did over 600 Jewish lawyers from Budapest who were killed in the Holocaust), Mr. Soros decided to resist. He quickly justified this on the moral grounds of self-defense.

   Deprived of his livelihood and his property, Mr. Soros decided to use camouflage to protect his family (wife, two sons, and mother-in-law) by pretending to be Christians under assumed names. Although he knew nothing about how to undertake such a deception, he soon learned to acquire forged and real papers. He also shared what he learned with anyone who asked for his help. Those who were wealthy, he charged as much as he could. Everyone else, he either charged nothing or only what forged documents cost him.

   To be safest, the family continually lived apart from one another, meeting occasionally for coffee or a swim, and moved frequently. He helped them learn their "cover stories" and helped them practice how to react if braced by Nazis.

   There are many surprises in the book. Mr. Soros occasionally called on "Christians" for help who turned out to be other Jews using false papers. Some actual Christians took up wearing the yellow star, and the Nazis left them alone. While many people would not help, few turned Jews in to the Nazis. Some people would help for either profit or humanitarian reasons. You just had to keep looking until you found them. Most lost their nerve eventually and were either caught or stopped helping.

   Mr. Soros estimates that about 5 percent of all Jews in Budapest eventually obtained false papers. He also describes what happened to those who tried other ways out, like bribing Nazis such as Eichmann.

   The book is far more compelling than any spy novel I have ever read. It is also more inspiring because it shows what a committed "victim" of an evil regime can do. While other books portray Jews as being tough in concentration camps or in the Warsaw Ghetto, secretly hiding out in attics owned by friends, and being slaughtered, this one shows the side of a vigilent self-defense operating from an immediate defiance of the illegitimate authorities. This model needs to be well understood by everyone.

   Contemporary readers will also be fascinated to read about the rest of Mr. Soros's family, which includes the then 14-year-old George, who is now one of the world's richest men and famed fighter against totalitarian regimes. What an incredible family! The book also contains introductory comments by both sons, which will interest you as they recount the remarkable father they knew whom you will meet in this amazing book.

   The book was originally written in Esperanto, and was only recently translated into English for the first time.

   Everyone who wants to prevent future Holocausts must read this book!

   After you finish reading it, think about what you could do today to help someone else retain or gain their freedom and safety from injustice.

   Be prepared to save yourself . . . when all else fails! Saving someone else today increases your allies for tomorrow!




2. "Life is beautiful - and full of variety and adventure. But luck must be on your side." So begins a remarkable memoir of Jewish life under the Nazis in Hungary, _Masquerade: Dancing Around Death in Nazi-Occupied Hungary_ (Arcade) by Tivadar Soros. Soros was a thoroughly remarkable man who certainly had variety and adventure in his life, and his share of luck. There are many accounts of the horrors of the Holocaust, and Soros certainly does not minimize the death and terror that he witnessed. Unlike many such accounts, however, this is a story of optimism and triumph. Soros and all his family survived.

   His memoir begins in 1944 when the Nazis occupied Germany. Soros realized that "Since we can't stand up to Hitler's fury, we must hide from it." He and his family hid, but since they had to be seen in order to take care of daily needs, they took on the aspects of Christians. This involved his forming close relationships with a series of forgers, and once he took care of his immediate family's documents, he took care of other relatives, and then friends, and clients. "If anyone asked for my help, one of my principles in life was never to say no - if only to avoid diminishing their faith in human beings." Amidst narrow escapes and harrowing close calls, Soros kept a sense of humor which frequently emerges on these pages. As a "Christian," Soros was able to obtain cigarettes when those were denied to Jews, and since he didn't smoke, he would leave them at a watchmaker's, so that people with stars could get some. He went to the watchmaker to get his watch fixed, and asked the price. "How can you ask such a thing? It's on the house," the watchmaker said, and then whispered to the woman working beside him, "This is the Christian gentleman who brings us the cigarettes, you know." Soros says, "At least the Jews got to see that there were still a few decent Christians." Much of the humor is tinged with humane sadness; according to one of his sons, Soros used to say, "It is amazing how well people can bear the suffering of others."

   This wonderful memoir has been in print before. Soros, that practical idealist, as an Esperantist wrote the original in Esperanto in 1965, three years before his death. In libraries of Esperantists the book has been an outstanding volume from the literature the planned language has produced. It is here translated by Humphrey Tonkin, a linguist whose name is familiar to all American Esperantists. It includes brief, loving memoirs by his sons, one of whom, George, has become one of the world's richest and most influential people. If there is room on your shelves for history with hope, written by a thoroughly humane and lovable man, this book is perfect.




3. I lived in Budapest for several years and became fascinated by the stories of those brave souls who survived there through the trials of the last century. This recently translated memoire is one of the best. Mr. Soros is able to convey convincingly his experiences in Budapest during the last years of WWII. Like the best memoires, it offers a window into the mind and thoughts of the author in a way which rings true and resonates with the reader. For those who are interested by the human experience in this period of history, this is a must read.



4. This book has it all: drama, humor, philosophy, and history. The author is an unprepossessing, very clever, unsung hero, who makes humane, practical, difficult decisions daily and keeps his nerve under the Nazi occupation of Hungary. The number of lives he saves can never be properly tallied. You will find yourself alternately holding your breath and then cheering.

5 comments about A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry.

1. If you are interested in the dark events leading to the holocaust, especially French collaboration, this is an absorbing book. For those not quite so familiar with Vichy France it will be an eye opener, for there can be no doubt that many French officials bent over backwards to serve their German masters during those shameful periodic roundups and deportations of the Jews in France. New to this reader, were the descriptions of the horrible conditions of the "refugee camps" in Vichy-controlled France. These were not the infamous concentration camps because detainees could be released, but they were, nonetheless, death camps simply because of shameful conditions and inhuman neglect. In fact, some 3,000 Jews and non- Jews died in those camps in southern France because of the atrocious conditions.

   But French Vichy officials were not the only villains. Americans may be surprised to learn just how anti-Semitic U.S. officialdom was during the early years. One could argue that were it not for the openly anti-Semitic treatment of Jews by our own State Department there would be no book written about Varian Fry. If all of the US officials in France, in the Embassy and various consulates, had a mind set to save the Jews it is quite likely thousands more could have been saved. Varian Fry filled a void. He was fighting two battles, the enemy in France and the enemy at home, in the form of the State Department. It was a shameful period, only fairly recently recognized by former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

   This book, about Varian Fry's rescue of the Jews under the auspices of the American Emergency Rescue Committee, raises some questions. Why was he not recognized sooner? And why did many of those Jews rescued seem to turn their backs on him, once saved? Part of the answer is simply that Fry is not a very heroic figure, not even particularly likable. For some he was distant, not easy to know, but he did what he had to do at the time and that did not include being popular with everyone. It is unfortunate that personality flaws probably did play a role early on in the assessment of his role in that period. Even after reading this book, I cannot shake an ambivalent view of Fry as a tragic figure caught very much by accident in an heroic period. Yet, what he did rightfully makes him a hero.

   One must read this book to better understand that tragic period and place. Marseilles was the end of a funnel at the beginning of the war. Jews from all over Europe were spilling into that port city, desperate to get out, their backs against the Mediterranean wall, but not a non-Jewish friend in sight to help. Enter a few good people like Fry. It would suffice to be a hero at that time in that place simply by feeling compassion. Elie Wiesel expressed it when he said, "In those times one climbed to the summit of humanity simply by remaining human."

   There were other heros and heroines to be sure, the cooperative police inspector, the compassionate Prefet official. I had just finished reading Mary Jayne Gold's Memoir of Marseilles, 1940-1941 in which she recounts her version of that same rescue effort. My feeling is that she deserves a little better treatment than Marino gave her. The fact that Fry may have dismissed her should not diminish her contribution. Although deceased now after a long life, she genuinely felt that those were really the only useful years of her life. (See Amazon.com for review of her book, "Crossroads Marseilles, Nineteen Hundred and Forty" by Mary Jayne Gold)

   In short, an absorbing well researched book. Although many of the players on that Marseilles stage have now passed from the scene, including Varian Fry, Marino had the good fortune of being able to interview many of those still living. The book is not at all pedantic, but I do wish to thank the author for expanding my vocabulary with "spavined" and "solipsism".




2. Sometime, not-so-admirable people do incredibly admirable things, and find in themselves qualities that no one, themselves included, knew were there. Such was the case of Varian Fry.

   In August 1940, Varian Fry boarded a plane in New York and flew to Spain, and from there to Marseilles, on a mission that would resonate far beyond his imagination.

   Fry was an historian, involved with "radical" politics: the Spanish Civil War, the looming Holocaust. He went from observing and writing about the coming crises to actively participating in a way that no one who knew him, or even he himself, would have anticipated. Far from being identified as a humanitarian, he was, in fact, an intellectual snob, a classicist by training.

   But he put his life on the line in an effort to save the leading cultural, intellectual, and artistic lights of Europe. Truth to tell, he had no idea what he was getting himself, or his New York sponsors, into, so the evolution of this rather untouchable, remote aesthete into a mover and shaker who consorted with the Marseilles underworld (and enjoyed it!) and worked outside the law is fascinating to observe.

   Varian Fry was personally responsible for saving the lives of, among others, Marc Chagall, Lion Feuchtwanger, Victor Serge, Heinrich Mann, André Gide, Franz Werfel, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt... He also saved about 1500 other lesser known people. Altogether, in the year he spent in France before being arrested and kicked out by the Vichy puppets of the Gestapo, he turned himself inside out, discovering in himself a depth of caring and feeling that neither he, nor most of the people who knew him, would have suspected was present.

   The story itself is so riveting that the book would have to be illiterate not to be absorbing. I found it well-written, with fascinating studies of the characters who worked with, and against Fry. It sort of fades out at the end, but then again, so did Fry, after his return to New York. He died in 1967, unrecognized for his work until the year before his death. In 1996, Israel further declared him "Righteous Among the Nations," the only American so honored.




3. I encourage anyone interested in WWII to read this book. Especially fascinating to me were the depiction of important characters in pre-war Europe. I gobbled the book, then started looking for more - I would advise against following this book with Varian Fry's own account of this period, because it seems like Marino covered it pretty well.



4. As the other reviewers indicate, this is an excellent book. The setting of Fry's heroism, Marseille and the environs of the South of France, permit an oblique perspective on the Holocaust, which unfolded principally much farther to the north and the east. Without the overwhelming machinery of the sealed boxcars, the gas chambers, the crematoria, some of the underlying causes of the Holocaust come into focus: the bureacratic obstructionism of the U.S. State department, motivated partly by national self interest and partly by the genteel anti-Semitism of individual Foreign Officers, provides a glimpse into how value-free institutional behaviour can be--a deadly underlying cause in Hitler's rise. The sympathetic behaviour of peasants living on the border and of petty police officers contrasts with the callous, and often actively evil, behaviour of their official leaders.

   But always, there is the central enigma of Varian Fry himself--a complex, difficult , troubled man, in many ways a talented failure, who because of his clear moral vision became the catalyst for saving the flower of European artists and writers from the clutches of the Gestapo and their collaborators.

   In another book, Todorov posits that in extreme moral situations, the basic moral unit for effective action is two, because he notes that the rescuers--Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust were rarely individuals; often they were husbands and wives. Todorov's idea is the combination of personality traits and practical abilities that produces effective resistence to an overwhelming social climate of evil is beyond the range of a single individual, and that it requires a minimum of two people to act effectively in this kind of environment.

   Interestingly, Fry did organise a staff of incredibly courageous co-workers to help save his "clients", but the intriguing question is whether his very flaws were part of Fry's mysterious ability to distance himself from his society (ie American) and to plunge into effective action to resist Hitler's evil earlier than almost anyone else.

   This intriguing book is very rewarding and worthwhile. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 only because of an occasional passage in which the author, who seems to be almost super-abundantly talented, seems to stray into almost novelistic detail that would seem unlikely to be supported by his research. This is mostly atmospheric, and doesn't cast a shadow on the facts themselves.




5. Hermann Goering is reputed to have said, "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my pistol."
   This, from one of the most prolific looters of art in recent history, takes some explanation which, as it happens, is not forthcoming.
   However, upon reading of Varian Fry's heroic attempts to keep Europe from "blowing its brains out" by detaining and, certainly, eventually killing intellectuals wholesale, one may have a bit of sympathy for Goering.
   It isn't the art, it's the artists.
   Fry was an odd character from his earliest days when he easily manipulated his parents into letting him avoid school and do whatever it was that his latest whim desired.
   He had an unusual though substantial education, and was a writer and journalist and left-wing intellectual in the Thirties. He was also what used to be called "neurotic" in that he had a number of personality traits we could call counterproductive, if we could ever figure out what Fry might think of as productive. He had a bit of hypochondria, was sometimes hardpressed to make a decision, made friends and lost them over small things, and married an older woman with whom he had a relationship whose aspects, as Marino details them, make the reader squirm, just a bit, over what Marino doesn't detail.
   Whatever he managed to accomplish in those days seems to have been a function of high intelligence and fierce energy, opposed by various personality quirks.
   And then he went to Marseille to rescue European intellectuals.
   His transformation at that point is amazing. From intellectual dilettante, indulging his personal whims, he became, overnight, indistinguishable from a hardened and trained operative of the OSS or the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). Marino does not tell us how that happened, since it is almost certainly inexplicable.
   Unfortunately for Fry and others, the same process did not occur in many of those he tried to help.
   If there is one thing I did not expect in reading this book, it was the difficulty, sometimes the near impossibility, of chivvying various intellectuals through reasonably simple (given the circumstances) procedures that would save their lives.
   Some, told to keep a low profile while things were worked out, paraded themselves in Marseille's restaurants and bars. Others refused simple instructions, or jibbed at the last moment, doing either nothing or something quite stupid. Fry spent a good deal of the time and resources he had--not much of either--in bailing out individuals or repairing or replacing procedures they'd put in jeopardy.
   It is almost too good to be true, in terms of literary contrast, to find that Fry also had a group of British soldiers captured prior to Dunkirk to get out of the France. These men, fit and cheerful, followed directions without question, solved what problems remained, and were successfully sent home. There could have been no greater contrast between ordinary people and intellectuals.
   Any reader who becomes involved in the narrative must, although sixty years and more have gone, become frustrated at the inability of Fry's charges to get out of their own way. One, after having been trouble on the European end, arrived safely in New York and began babbling to all about every secret arrangement Fry had made to get him and others safely out of the Gestapo's clutches.
   Fry, for this period, was clear-minded and hard-headed and full of energy. In periods of crisis, people can go into overdrive for extended periods of time. Eventually, they collapse. Fry, however, managed to work like a fiend for months in circumstances of the greatest stress. He never lost his focus and, indeed, was able to operate outside any constraints that one might have thought his earlier life placed on him. In one case, having been betrayed and done out of a substantial amount of funding, Fry met with some of Marseille's underworld bosses and took out a murder contract on the traitor.
   Eventually, having been sent home by the authorities, he returned to the intellectual's life he'd left, including neuroses, counterproductive activities, odd relationships, and eventual death in obscurity.
   The obscurity is partly a matter of official activity. It wasn't until many years later, when Fry was honored in Israel as one of the Righteous, that Warren Christopher apologized on behalf of the State Department for all the obstructionism Fry had had to face from the United States.
   Fry saved a great many intellectuals from death, providing the West, mostly the United States, with an intellectual boost (some became successful screenwriters as well), by finding within himself a person absolutely invisible to anyone looking at him either before or after his exploits. The greatest mystery of the story is that contradiction.
   The second greatest mystery is why saving intellectuals from certain death is so much like herding cats.
   What is it about them?

5 comments about A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

1. I am very interested in the Fragments affair and was eager to read this new account of it. Unfortunately I found this book disappointing. It adds little new to the other published works, notably historian Stefan Maechler's excellent account which was published in English last year. While Eskin has a good style, his narrative is jumbled, he skips around a lot and it is often hard to work out what is going on. Also Eskin virtually ruins his own book by going on endlessly about himself when it is really not relevant to Wilkomirski's story. There are too many unnecessary uses of the words I, me, and myself by Eskin to make this a focussed study of the Fragments affair.



2. When I read Fragments I could not understand how anyone could have believed Binjamin Wilkomirski's story. It was incredible that a child as small as he claimed to have been could have survived a Nazi death camp (much less two) or recalled the things he claimed to remember. By the time I read it, the book had been exposed as fiction. But the tale seemed to me so weak that I doubted I would have found it any more convincing had I read it in 1996, before the scandal broke.

   As a longtime student of the Holocaust, I was therefore fascinated by Wilkomirski's exposure as Bruno Doessekker, the Swiss birth-child of Yvonne Berthe Grosjean, who surrendered her son for adoption in 1945; he was ultimately adopted by the Doessekkers.

   Stefen Maechler's Wilkomirski Affair (2001) provided a superb and thorough expose of the fraud Bruno Grosjean Doessekker perpetrated. Maechler pursued every possible lead, compared each minute detail in Doessekker's narration of "events" with historical records from such leading Holocaust scholars as Raul Hilberg and Lawrence Langer and accounts of other child survivors. He interviewed members of the Doessekker and Grosjean families and more. The most damning evidence Maechler unearthed was that in 1981, Doessekker/Wilkomirski contested the will of Yvonne Grosjean, whom, in a letter to officials in Bern Switzerland, he called "my birth mother." He received a third of her estate.

   Wilkomirski/Doessekker had also used Laura Grabowski, who claimed to have known him in a children's home in Krakow, to "corroborate" his story. In fact, Grabowski is an American citizen of Christian faith who has since her youth fabricated stories about her victimhood, the most well-publicized being a book called Satan's Sideshow: The Real Story of Lauren Stratford. Lauren Stratford's Social Security number is the same as that of Grabowski, who used it to make a false survivor's claim. Maechler even found similarities between Satan's Sideshow and Fragments. But Maechler did not answer the question of how Wilkomirski/Doessekker drew people in.

   Blake Eskin masterfully picks up that loose strand from a personal perspective: His maternal great-grandmother Anna Wilbur had immigrated in 1929 to New York from Riga--the Latvian city Wilkomirski/Doesseker said he was from. Her family had changed their surname name from Wilkomirski to Wilbur on their arrival in New York. Moreover, Anna Wilbur's brother and sister-in-law had in 1926 lived at 80 Moskva Street, the same address Wilkomirski/Doessekker claimed as his. Thus was Eskin's family taken in.

   They understandably longed for news of distant relations left behind in Riga, years before the Holocaust. They knew existentially what the Holocaust had done. They had not yet personalized the loss, however. In that context, it is not surprising that Eskin's mother, Eden Force Eskin, and her first cousin once removed, Miriam Vim, wanted to believe that Wilkomirski/Doesseker was Anna Wilbur's long lost nephew.

   Eskin takes readers on his two-fold journey, as he discovers both Doessekker/Wilkomirski's fraud and his family's roots in Riga and Israel. He covers some of the same ground as Maechler, but he adds a human dimension of which Maechler's sturdy reportorial account is devoid.

   This book opens new intellectual and emotional understanding to losses suffered by the world's Jewish community during the Holocaust. Even now, families that once believed they had completely escaped that terrible trauma are discovering whom and what they lost--family, culture, language, and an entire world. Though but one example of that discovery, Eskin's investigations prove somewhat archetypal.

   The Nazi Holocaust extinguished the lives of roughly a third of the Jewish people. Some families, like Eskin's, remained for years oblivious to their personal losses. But Eskin shows that very few were untouched. In that context, it's easy to see why families still hope to find their members among the living. And that context is the only thing that can lay the Wilkomirski/Doessekker fraud to its final and necessary rest. Alyssa A. Lappen




3. I enjoyed "A Life in Pieces" very much! Far from the narrative being jumbled, I found Eskin's weaving together of his personal search for his family's roots, along with the related story of the Wilkomirski hoax, very skillful. The story is told on 2 levels. It was the fraudulent claims of Bruno Grosjean/Doessekker, AKA Binjamin Wilkomirski, which ironically awakened interest in the author's ancestors, since his mother's family name was originally Wilkomirski. After a family reunion to meet the bogus 'relative', the author details his attempts to learn of his family from elderly relatives. This leads ultimately to a visit to Riga, Latvia, where the family's forebears came from. He then moves on to Israel, where long lost relatives, descendents of that remnant of the family that remained in Europe, are located. Eskin's own experience as a 3rd. generation Jewish American mirrors those of many, like myself, whose families had relatives who escaped from or who became victims of the Nazis. This book was written as part memoir. Therefore, his use of 'I', 'me' and 'myself' is wholly appropriate. It is a fascinating story which raises all sorts of troubling philosophical issues. These issues include the plight of former child survivors, false memories, victimhood, and family. Unfortunately, these issues more than ever before, took form with 'Wilkomirski' and his claims. I very strongly recommend this thought provoking work.



4. In a word, too much "me", too little on the affair Wilkomirski. As the author recounts, Wilkomirski repeatedly refused to be interviewed, and despite valiant, pushy attempts, Eskin never succeeds in cornering his quarry. But descriptions of these nonencounters do not make for compelling reading. Nor do long ramblings about the extended Wilkomirski family. With little to write about, Eskin falls back on writing about himself, and neither he nor his relatives have a story to tell that merits book length treatment. This is essentially a family memoir piggybacked over the Wilkomirski affair. Eskin plays up his tangential connection to the curious Fragments episode, but the family connection is based on hope, not reality, and the writing, amorphous and rambling, reflects the lack of content.

   Most important, I miss entirely a moral viewpoint. The crux of the issue is evaded: is there an objective truth, or is being a Holocaust survivor an entirely subjective matter of "feeling" like a survivor? The payoff at the end - the discovery of a tangible connection to distant relatives in Israel - is awfully thin stuff for the overlong buildup that preceded it.




5. I was so much looking forward to reading this book to learn the details of the author of Fragments, but ultimately this book left me with more questions than I had before I read it, not to mention bringing up more issues and then leaving them unresolved. For example, was Binjamin tattooed with a number on his arm? We are told that Varena is not Binjamin/Bruno's wife, but then are never told who she is or what connection she has to him. Was any DNA evidence ever made public, or is Binjamin/Bruno's true identity an ongoing mystery? I am reading the article in Granta #66 by Elena Lappin, and in the first few pages have learned that Binjamin/Bruno was married prior to his relationship with Varena and has three children! What a shocker. Why was this not mentioned in Eskin's book? Where are the children now and what do they think about the whole Wilkomirski affair? In any case, this book is passable as an introduction to the case, but I do agree with another reviewer here who stated that Eskin's personal history, other than being the catalyst to his investigation of the Wilkomirski affair, is really not very interesting (and this from a lover of memoirs and family history).

5 comments about Hiding in Plain Sight: The Incredible True Story of a German-Jewish Teenager's Struggle to Survive in Nazi-Occupied Poland.

1. While attending a Bat Mitzvah of a relative, I was fortunate to meet and talk with Betty Lauer, the author of "Hiding in Plain Sight". I told her that I enjoyed the book immensely but found it hard to believe that she could experience so many crises. She said"Believe me: it is true" I said that it must have been very difficult for her to change her faith. She said that was very easy because both of our faiths belive in one God. She is a very upbeat woman.



2. Written in a straight-forward style with at least surface artlessness, I found this an engrossing account of a teenage Jewish girl's struggle to survive in Poland after the Nazis took over. While it does not have the overpowering aura of authenticity that is inherent in Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness (Volume I read by me on 11 June 1999 and Volume II on 7 Apr 2000), I was caught up by this account and though one knew she survived (else the book would not exist) one had to remind oneself of that as she went from situation to situation. I think it necessary for one to remind oneself repeatedly of the inhuman behavior of so many people during the Hitler years, lest one take civil liberty for granted. She does meet people who are human but also there are many who behaved in a way which they surely have regretted ever since--I hope.



3. This book is the choice of two reading groups and many individuals anticipating the visit by author Betty Lauer to our area. It is a vivid and gripping account of events in Poland and Germany of World War II from inside the feelings and emotions of an intelligent, courageous, and sensitive Jewish teenager. It is captivating reading and a major contribution to the documentation of the Holocast. Suitable for all ages.
   
   An obstacle was the small print and very tight binding that made it difficult to keep the book open.



4. Ms. Lauer gives us her almost-incredible account of survival in WWII Poland as a "submarine"; someone sought by the Nazi occupation as a Jewess (zydowka or Judin), yet who could manage by dying her hair blonde, acting confident, finding "female" occupations such as housework and babysitting, to survive in plain sight on the streets of WArsaw, Berlin, and small Polish towns. Rooms to rent were very hard to come by, but most Poles lost their pensions with the Nazi invasion, so many either had to start working or take in boarders. The native population was as frightened of arrest as these GErman Jewish refugees; if nothing else, aiding and abetting in the hiding of Jews or other undesirables could result in a concentration camp or death. Such a signal as having no fur collar on a winter coat indicated one's Jewishness: Jews were not allowed to own furs, had to turn them in; so obtaining a fur collar became another battle for assimilation/passing. In such and many other examples, the reader gradually realizes that Jews could often "hide in plain sight" by aping gentile behavior and clothing, going to Church, etc.
   
   What amazed this reader, after having lived for years in Europe (1980's), is the quite obvious fact that many who hired her or rented her and her mother rooms were aware from the start that they were Jews on the run. Sometimes it would simply erupt at the very end as they were vacating rooms or were let go from a job. Therefore, what you can conclude, most Europeans could recognize these Jewish "submarines" but for many reasons, perhaps from Christian principles or common decency, or hatred of the Occupation, they would not cooperate with the Nazis and turn them in.
   
   She does comment that the gentile women would not bother her on the street or in public streetcars, but that the men, ages 18-60, were to be avoided. They would hit on her, call her "zydowka", and try to turn her into the police - and she would run. This kind of detail brings to light that not just Jew-hatred was at play, but some kind of sexual tension was added to the turmoil. One might guess that the gentile women would want her taken away, but apparently it was the gentile men disturbed at her bottle-blonde freedom and assimilation. Why? Worth speculating about!
   
   The book is so full of details, of names, job descriptions, food and clothing and weather, that one can only wonder that Ms. Lauer could even remember so much. A photographic memory at the least! Those interested in WWII occupied countries, in Jew hatred by gender, in the harshness of Polish life, in the minutiae of survival, will find this book fascinating. I personally enjoyed even hearing what they wore, how they found food, how they cooked it, how they found medical help, how information through letters was smuggled, how cyanide tablets were sewn into seams, new shoes made of old ski boots, etc. etc.
   
   She admits that one great advantage simply lay in her not having been circumcised, as her men were: her pants could not be pulled down and her parts examined. Only Jewish men were circumcised in Europe then.
   
   A book full of tension, a trip down memory lane: old-fashioned Poland. She was only a teenager, and her heart often yearned just for friendship with another girl, but her coreligionists' extreme undesirability made even that comfort almost impossible, for she could not risk excess talk. She would give herself and her mother away. A great story! There must have been many more, but who writes these long-ago details down so well?



5. This book is really incredible. Its a remarkable story of faith & survival of this young girl by hiding her real identity moving from town to town in a war torn country. Its a miracle that the author survived this ordeal and she has come out really strong. I am one of the lucky ones to know Betty personally as we are gym-buddies now but I came to know of the book thru another gym buddy as Betty is very modest to even mention that she has written a book. Its an awesome book and this book is going to be in my book collection forever.

5 comments about Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years.

1. Mikhail Sebastian was the Romanian Walter Benjamin. Trained as a lawyer and a literary critic, Sebastian published a highly-regarded novel at the age of 23. He held one of those literary-functionary jobs requiring very little actual work or presence at the office which Europe once awarded to its philosophers and artists. Like Benjamin, Sebastian was a skittish, highly personable writer: a professional skeptic, an independent thinker, who could amuse himself indefinitely with his own thoughts and company.

   To see the War through Sebastian's eyes in this diary is to finally understand it. The journal - together with Radu Ioanid's recently published history of the Romanian holocaust - certainly explodes the myth that Romania was a "good" place to be Jewish during WW2. In fact, the Antonescu's wartime government - reactive always to the country's popular ultra-fascist Iron Guard - annhilated half the country's Jews, some 150,000 people. The "cut" was purely geographic: Bessarabia and Bukovina, two cities bordering Odessa with large Jewish populations, were targeted for ethnic cleansing; whereas the Jews of Bucharest were merely subject to statutes barring their employment, use of amenities, etc. But what's most extraordinary about the Journals is the way that it gives this kind of victimage-by-chance a human face: curious and halting.

   Over the course of two years, Sebastian is exiled from the inner circles of the Bucharest literati. His close friends and mentors, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, have become intelletual leaders of the Iron Guard. Sebastian waits in Bucharest, increasingly unemployable due to anti-Semitic statutes and restrictions, borrowing money to pay the rent while fully aware of the massacres and pogroms that were taking place in the northern regions of his country.

   The apartments of Bucharest Jews were confiscated; and then their telephones; and then eventually their skis?! Each week brought new onslaughts of mad and crippling restrictions. Sebastian notes tbe "mute despair that has become a kind of Jewish greeting." He witnesses this, with no illusions, while trying to piece together a subsistence living for himself and his parents, at times writing plays which would be produced under the names of non-Jewish friends, which he was eventually best known for.

   Sebastian never married; he had a number of simultaneous & consecutive affairs with married and independent women, as was the custom at that time and place. He had no children. He has a great sense of vocation as a writer and a thinker, and this Journal comes closer than any document I've read to conveying a sense of the "dazed stupor ... with no room for gestures, feeling, words" that comes from living alongside horror.




2. The fabricated myth, by the Roumanian Nationalists, that Roumania was a "good" place to be for a Jew, during the Holocaust is to be completely and forever forgotten. From the accounts of Mihail Sebastian, it is obvious that the Roumanian intelligentia, the literary circles were filled with Legionairs that spreed antisemitism in a most vicious manner. The German SS Killing Detachments were, according to Eichman's testimony during his trial, abhorred and disgusted by the crude cruelty of the Roumanian troups during the deportation of the Jewish population from Bassarabia to camps in Transnistria. The Roumanian Nation as a whole, is guilty of the extermination of is Jewish population, collectively the Nation should repent just like the Germans. This of course requires self-examination, admission and a certain degree of intelligence. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the true socio-political climat in Roumania during WW2.



3. This is a unique document from any perspective you approach it. I found it particularly revealing about my father's background; Bucharest's middle class before WWII. The author came from a Jewish community who regarded itself as an assimilated part of a basically friendly Rumania. The amicable feelings towards Rumania have always run deep in its Jewish expatriates. Those who immigrated to Israel recreated a piece of pre-war Bucharest in Tel-Aviv. The book's description of a specific social set fascinates, with its elegant frivolity and gregarious bonhomie that was stifled under Ceausescu, but survived in my parent's social circle and in that of the Rumanian Jewish community.

   Sebastian parades a delightful set of characters. From the comical Prince Antoine Bibescu, who walks to theatre among the barbarians "en pantoufles," to the playwright Eugène Ionesco, Sebastian's pen never fails to capture the essence his friends' personalities. Ionesco is mentioned only in passing but his predicament is sobering, if not unique. He was not able to keep his job because of his mother's Jewish background. Ionesco, who never identified himself as Jewish, had not experienced life as a minority and had difficulties dealing with his new status. Apparently he had an emotional breakdown before he finally succeeded in returning to France. I do not think that Ionesco or his biographers ever expounded on that chapter of his life from this perspective. What he had experienced in Rumania at the time may explain the inspiration for his play, Rhinocéros (1958).

   This amusing social tapestry is but a background and introduction to the real drama of this diary. The author portrays the gradual evolution of a very sinister external reality, and more significantly, his own reactions to it. It illustrates a difficult and conflictual internal process of disillusionment, of realigning one's internal alliances, or, perhaps, the creeping realization that your friends are turning into rhinoceroses. As the author discovers during the peak of the persecutions, this is a process many assimilated Jews went through in past centuries under similar circumstances.

   Sebastian refers to his homeland as "a Balkan swamp," where people change political affiliations like they change their shirts (something at which Ionesco's father was particularly good). He makes some lucid observations about Rumanian Jews' easy optimism and, contrary to common belief, the Jews' short memory of past tragedies. This selective amnesia of prior calamities is an attitude prevalent among Rumanian Jews in Israel, who nurture a sympathetic viewpoint about the events described in this book.

   Indeed, this book confronts basic notions many people hold about that era of Rumanian history; making it highly controversial. My parents are a perfect illustration of the strong but contradictory feelings it arouses. My mother, deported from Cernauti (Chernovitz) in Bucovina to a concentration camp with the rest of her family, had no problems accepting Sebastian's account. My father, on the other hand, who hails from Bucharest, responded with disbelief to my reports about my revelations from the text. He remembered many of the events reported, for example the confiscation of the radios and the forced labor, but he refused to put it in any special context. His recollection was suffused with what seemed to me like heavy denial of the meaning and purpose of the regime's behavior. He combined this with a peculiar version of the history of those times, and a disturbing set of rationalizations of events ("it was only the Iron Guard," or, "everybody I knew survived"). He agreed to read the book, but after he received it, changed his mind and refused. Needless to say, my family, like many others, has never reached an agreement about the basic facts of the period. Another way of understanding the kind of condoning spirit displayed by my father is that it is representative of ethnic minorities' traditionally docile attitude towards authority. This deference, accentuated by fear, may also explain how millions of Jews were gullible enough to allow the Nazis to gas them. The Israelis' intransigence represents a backlash against generations of this servile obeisance, not unlike the kind of militant political transformation experienced by American blacks in the 20th century.




4. First of all, the "Journal" is exquisitly written.
   Then, this is The Book for understanding multiple facets of life in war-time Romania, shining light on previously hidden places.

   A note of strong dissagreement with a previuos reviewer's assesment of reasons for which the book is supposedly absent from Romanian bookstores:

   This book is not "out of print" in its original version, it has been printed multiple times (last time in 2002) and is available as we speak. It is being bought off the shelves like fresh bread every time Humanitas re-prints it.
   Thousands and thousands of Romanians bought, read, discussed, reviewed and raved about the Journal. We were changed by it, as any other feeling human would! Countless echoes in the press, radio and TV shows were generated by this publication.

   Sebastian's Journal became a cornerstone of our perception of Romania's past, not just for a handful of passionate readers but for a whole nation.
   Noam, research before you write.




5. A diary can be as interesting as the person who writes it is and Mihail Sebastian is a complex character. I liked the way he documents his love exploits, the illusions and the hopes he has, his love of music as the ultimate refuge, the detailed account of writing his best novel, "The accident", and his plays, the total sincerity and subjectivity. There are so many nuances in the friendships he keeps - like the one with Mircea Eliade, Iron Guard legionaire and his friend for more than 15 years, like Camil Petrescu, colourful and overconfident writer, and many more.
   When reading the diary, you come to know the frivolous Romanian interbellic "elites", the painful exploits of literary creation, friendships streched by political divide, the uncertainty of the war, the humiliation of the Jews during fascism. Besides, Sebastian's writing style is beautiful and easy to follow.
   This book is mostly perceived as an account of the Holochaust in Romania. However, it has much more to offer. Not only the grim and the militant view of the events, but the full caleidoscope of Sebastian's personna.

4 comments about World War II through Polish Eyes.

1. The novel is a spellbinding portrait of a young girl, Danuta, and her family's journey from peacetime Poland to the German and subsequent Soviet occupation. The author provides a balanced blend of historical background along with intense emotional drama. One can sense the intensity of the hardships, suffering and periods of joy and triumphant over ultimate terror, dishevel and human tragedy. Danuta's extreme resourcefulness, perseverance and wit against the German and Soviet occupants allow her and her family to survive eventhough impending danger is always omnipresent. This true account of Danuta's life expounds on actual events such as random transports to concentration camps, Katyn massacre, indiscriminate shootings and beatings, starvation, ect.. The story line includes a microcosm of the brutalities and cruelties exacted upon the Polish population during World War II. This true story is supported with annotations with a bibliography of historical references. The reality of Danuta's life is also supported with copies of letters written by her husband from Auschwitz prison and other documents to further exemplify the harsh and abominable conditions of life in wartime Poland. The story continually returns to an elderly Danuta who is instructing her young grandson on the historical background of Poland's barbaric occupation centered on the conspiracy of the German-Soviet agreements and subsequent betrayal between the two dictators. Poland becomes a battle ground in the quest for power while Polish resistance, including members of Danuta's family, struggles to resist German and Soviet oppression. The apprehension and tension and hope for the end of the German occupation results in the subjugation of Poland by the Soviet apparatus. Danuta's family must adjust to the Soviet regime change which proves to be a desperate struggle to resist total subjugation of Poland. This novel is a recommended reading to better comprehend the human tragedy of Poles during World War II as seen through the eyes of young Danuta.



2. World War II Through Polish Eyes
   By
   M.B. Szonert

   This powerful story depicts the gehenna of one Polish family during the greatest human catastrophe in Poland's history. Young Danuta and her family struggles through the invasion of Poland, the defense of Warsaw, and the German occupation. They suffer tragic losses in Katyñ, Siberia, Auschwitz and dozens of other concentration camps, in Gestapo and NKVD prisons, on Monte Cassino, in the Warsaw Uprising, and on the Western front. Danuta loses her husband and her father but thanks to the tenacious solidarity of the Polish people she survives the war with two small children. She later tries to begin a new life, remarries in the 50ties, and immigrates to the United States.

   The book is easy to read thanks to many dialogs and vivid images. What is striking in this story is the attitude of the Polish women - mothers, daughters, and wives. For example, 19-year old Danuta writes to the Auschwitz commander asking him to show a photograph of her newly born son "Jêdruœ" to her husband - an Auschwitz prisoner. In a humanitarian flash, the commander actually releases Danuta's husband from the death camp. It reminds me of my own story when my own photograph (my nickname is also "Jêdruœ") saved the life of my father when he was called to the infamous Pavilion Number 11 in the same concentration camp. Danuta continues her crusade and later fights with the Gestapo to recover the body of her husband, and with NKVD to save her father and brother. Although the women were wise and prudent in those difficult times, the men were often too reckless and were dying unnecessarily.

   This work is not only a fascinating story but also a history book. Each episode from Danuta's dramatic life is told in the larger, historical context. Presented with great diligence to assure a balanced approach to difficult issues, the historical context is well annotated and illustrated with documents and photographs. Written with a keen eye and thoroughness, this valuable work brings to light the enormity of the genocide committed on the Polish nation during WWII.
   Prof. Andrew Targowski
   WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY




3. When Hitler swallowed Austria and Czechoslovakia, he got APPROVALS from Britain and France. Poland was the first to resist him - and that is how World War II has started. This is known. The tragic fate of some 6 millions of Polish citizens during WWII is known too. Some 800 years earlier the Kings of Poland granted special priviledges to Jews so as to attract them to Poland and also save them from persecutions elsewhere. Hitler ended 800 years of coexistence of Christian Poles with Poles of Mosesian religous denomination (this is how Polish Jews were known inside Poland) by killing nearly all members of the latter group.

   Less is known here in the United States about the sufferings of
   non-Jewish citizens of Poland. VERY LITTLE is known about the diabolic JOINT plot of Hitler and Stalin to erase Poland and all its citizens from the surface of the earth. From a historical perspective, this book about Danuta and her life journey provides a wealth of important facts from first hand experience. Stories told me by my father Ludomir Boncza-Brzostowski confirm elements of the story of Danuta, also from first hand experience. He was among those who at the end of Warsaw 1944 Uprising got to the east side of Vistula so as not to surrender to the Nazis; as described in the book, most of those trying to do so were killed by the Nazi artillery. The command of the Polish Army on the Soviet side was taken away from Gen. Zygmunt Berling by Stalin - precisely because Berling tried to help the Uprising. As vividly desribed in the book, Stalin wanted Warsaw destroyed by Nazi hands.

   However, the above description of the book might give a totally false impression ! This is also a FASCINATING book about love and atrocity, friendship and war, adversity and solidarity. Do not be fooled by the awkward book title.




4. This book tells the incredibly true story of a Polish-American woman whose life encompassed most of the major events of Poland in World War II: the Katyn Massacre of Polish leaders by the Soviets; the random abduction of Poles on the streets of Warsaw for deportation to the Nazi concentration camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz); the Polish underground; the Warasw Uprising (the larger, longer, and lesser known uprising--not to be confused with the earlier Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) and the resultant systematic destruction of the city; and the atrocities of the Soviet "liberation."
   Based on the accounts of the protgaonist, the story is compellingly told, with only a few awkwardly written coversations between her and her grandson (which sound more like history lectures than believable dialog), and an occasional mistake with the author's English (my belief is that the author has learned English as a second language). These are minor, technical problems, though, and should not keep anyone from reading this important saga of one family's struggles for survival during those horrific times. The story of Poland's occupation, and its heroic struggle against annihilatio from both their Nazi enemies and their so-called Soviet allies is little known in the West. This book helps to give the reader a true feeling (with a human face)for what went on during one of the worst times in human history.

5 comments about Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story.

1. Recently, John Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times, made some comments about this book at a symposion at UC Berkeley that in a nutshell give you all the reasons you need not to read this book. He stated:

   "We published a story awhile back, by a very clever reporter named Roy Rivenburg, about a man who published his autobiography. And, if you read the autobiography, you'd be amazed you'd never heard of this man, because he pretty much single-handed won World War II for us. It was a preposterous book, and our review of it was an investigative review. It debunked many of the claims in this book and had some fun doing it, had a few laughs at the author's expense. When you put yourself out in public and make claims that are preposterous, and publish a book on it, you're likely to get a reviewer who will look into that and set the record straight. I'm very proud of that story, we haven't retracted a word of it, we don't intend to because it was true."

   This book is actually a biography (not autobiography) of Michel Thomas by a British writer named Christopoher Robbins. The book is well-written and reads like a thriller, but thanks to some fine investigative reporting by the LA Times we now know that many of the "heroic" exploits of Thomas' life may be more fiction than fact.




2. Being an avid fan of Michel's language teaching methods I was very very disappointed in "The Michel Thomas Story". Whilst Michel's early life and times made very sad reading, I felt that Christopher Robbins book, whilst good in many respects, did not really give an insight into Michel's personality or post-war life. It focused almost entirely on World War 2 and the problems that it bequeathed to Michel.
   
   For instance, Michel leaves Europe after WW2 and pops up in the USA but there is scant mention on how he made a living sufficient to finance and start up his language schools and the book practically ignores his contacts with many well-known people in Hollywood etc. His personal life must have had many more interesting threads than the writer of this biography has chosen to develop.
   
   If Michel himself were to write a biography I am sure that I would then feel that I knew the man behind the name and there is clearly much more of interest to develop in another book.
   
   Every success to Michel - his language teaching methods are simply magic and certainly work, even on me, a non-linguist!



3. This book is loaded with factual errors [in my opinion]. It makes claims about the World War II feats of Michel Thomas that are completely at odds with military records, newspaper articles from that era and other reliable sources.
   
   Some examples:
   
   1. Author Christopher Robbins claims Thomas was an officer in the U.S. Army. In fact, Thomas was a civilian employee, and the L.A. Times, which debunked much of this book, has National Archives military documents from 1946 bearing Thomas' signature over the words "civilian assistant."
   
   2. In the book, Thomas said he was born in Poland. However, for 38 years, he told journalists he was born in France -- and different parts of France at that.
   
   3. Robbins claims Thomas was with the first battalion of U.S. troops as it entered the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. After the L.A. Times proved otherwise, Thomas tried to backtrack, claiming he never said he was with the battalion, only that he arrived at Dachau sometime the first day. There are two problems with this explanation. First, the introduction to "Test of Courage" states that Thomas verified every fact in the book. Second, Thomas had been claiming he was with the first troops in newspaper articles dating back to the 1950s.
   
   4. The book says Thomas single-handedly discovered and rescued millions of Nazi Party ID cards from destruction at a paper mill near Munich in May 1945. But this version of events is flatly contradicted by October 1945 articles in the New York Times and London Express.
   
   5. Robbins also claims Thomas escaped Gestapo butcher Klaus Barbie. But in 1983, the U.S. Justice Department's chief Nazi hunter called a press conference to denounce Thomas' Klaus Barbie stories. And when Thomas testified at Barbie's 1987 trial, the prosecutor asked the jury to disregard Thomas' testimony, saying it wasn't made in good faith.
   
   Although the book purports to be thoroughly documented, the "evidence" [in my opinion] in it didn't hold up, as several media reports have demonstrated.



4. This book tells an improbable tale which, surprisingly, is entirely true.
   
   The book can be hard to follow chronologically for readers unfamiliar with WWII history, and its style can be a bit hagiographic at times, but the underlying facts of Thomas's life are supported by absolutely solid documentation and statements from Thomas's surviving wartime comrades, who went to bat for him when his bona fides were questioned by an L.A. Times humor columnist after the biography was published.
   
   In 2003, their testimonials were forwarded to the U.S. Army by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic New York City Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, along with original military documentation from the National Archives concerning the specific battles in which Thomas participated. The following year the U.S. Army awarded Thomas the Silver Star for his bravery fighting against the Nazis in 1944. In a moving ceremony, Senators Bob Dole and John Warner pinned the medal on Thomas in the shadow of the Atlantic Wall of the newly-dedicated WWII Memorial in Washington, in May 2004. Thomas's family and friends, and several of his wartime comrades stood by, many with tears in their eyes, along with an honor guard of Army Rangers standing at attention. Because Thomas was also a recognized member of the French Resistance, the Ambassador of France, M. Levitte, also attended the ceremony, and saluted Thomas's wartime heroism.
   
   [...]



5. James Bond was a fictionalized glorified version of Ian Fleming's war career, but it's openly fictitious and admittedly entertaining (if shallow). This book has the fiction and the shallowness, but it reflects really poorly on Michel Thomas as a person. I've three primary objections:
   (1) his chauvinism: MT always complains that women outside his family betray him, yet he manipulates them for his own purposes with no second thought (the daughter of the camp commandant for example, must have betrayed him because he refused her offer to rescue him a day before all the prisoners were rounded up, even though he was playing her to help his own survival). This rush to judgment that others have the worst-possible motives also shows in his attitudes towards the Poles, where he claims that Poland had the worst anti-Semitism in Europe (even though his own relations in Lodz were very successful), largely because he didn't think he and his mother were treated well (the worst thing that happened was a cruel joke where neighbors acted like he'd fallen down a well), where not long before the author discusses how his mother had done something socially unacceptable in the period by divorcing twice - so is it anti-Semitism or would a Catholic/Lutheran/etc. woman who divorced twice be treated similarly?
   (2) The nonsense about the Gestapo giving up on torturing him after six or seven hours makes a mockery of the many people who had suffered under the regime for much longer.
   (3) The claim of entering a psychological state making him incapable of feeling pain when he's being tortured - if this is really possible (and keep in mind neither the CIA and KGB could replicate a such feat), then it also makes a mockery of all the people throughout history who have suffered. It's simply that they didn't have MT's strength of character and mind to overcome their pain. Furthermore, if he did figure something like this out, he should have been visiting cancer or burn wards and teaching that to people instead of teaching languages to celebrities.
   
   Skip this book - I'm disappointed that anyone would participate a biography that portrays him as a egomaniacal self-righteous misogynist (MT apparently participated in the writing of it). The way that it's written calls into question all the other claims that MT has made about his war record.

2 comments about One Step Ahead: A Jewish Fugitive in Hitler's Europe.

1. I came across this escape memoir in researching my own family's escape from Antwerp during the invasion of May 1940. This is a well written, meticulous and gripping account of a 5 year odyssey through France and Italy during the war, including an account of pre-war life in Germany and Belgium. In addition to the usual depressing experiences, the writer recounts the numerous, often poor, rural (Christian) families he encountered who were incredibly helpful and generous, as well as Italian priests who aided the refugees and funneled desparately needed funds during the prolonged hiding. The author adds to his vivid, detailed first hand accounts some admirable fact and date checking, as well as references, often missing from such memoirs. A wonderful and well done book, deserving of more comment and sales than it has apparently achieved.



2. This is an incredible memoir. The events the author went through when he was basically still a kid had to have been terrifying. Yet he tells his story in a very straightforward, understated way that only someone of his generation could do. He doesn't really go into the emotional toll his years of hiding, running and fear had to have taken on him. He just tells his story - and it's riveting. I'm glad he had the courage to write this down. What a wonderful way to honor his mother and 3 beautiful sisters.

3 comments about Ruth's Journey: A Survivor's Memoir.

1. Unlike the other books where the concentration camps are well known and they are all the same story, this one is uniqe. Instead of gas chambers and crematoriums the people in Bershad were starved to death and near liberation, they were shot. even after liberation the book is exciting and heartbreaking. do not leave it sitting on the shelves.



2. Ms.Glasberg has had the courage to dig and relive her unspeakably hellish past. She has performed an everlasting act of kindness by giving thousands of Jews murdered, some sort of dignity. So many of them whithout even a marking to attest that once, not long ago they were part of families and communities full of life. May their memories live forever. As a decendant of a family from the Jewish Community in Chernowitz this book has taught me much of what became of my extended family back then.



3. I hope that any one that relly like to understad a jurney of life has to read it... life will look in other color at the end of the book. Good for the soul

5 comments about The Double Bond: The Life of Primo Levi.

1. I thought the concept of writing psychobabble books had gone out of style in the 1970s -- that is the concept of a biographer who did not know his/her subject personally, did not interview most of the subject's contemporaries (especially family members) and did not have access to any psychoanalytic records, writing an utterly speculative, fiction-laden account of a "great man's (or woman's)" life. This book by Angier is just such a pile of speculative junk. And poorly written and poorly organized to boot.

   Mind you, I am a fan of "analytical" biography & history. Where the author does not just narrate but attempts to interpret the facts & to tease out conclusions. Angier has gone so much farther than that. Since she speculates without facts and ignores existing facts (which is to say, the material in Primo Levi's own wonderful writings). She turns an interesting man, a fascinating man into a pathological man, who is no more than her (made up) aggregation of psychological complexes.

   I am so disappointed in the NY Times Review of Books for having featured this volume on the cover of their publication this weekend. Angier should pay me for having read it. Instead, I paid her.

   Instead of wasting your money on this junk, buy a complete set of Primo Levi's works [...]. And if you own them already. There is nothing better, I think, than reading the Periodic Table again.




2. Judging from the wildly differing reviews that have appeared in newspapers in the past few weeks, this book seems to inspire either passionate admiration or something akin to personal rage. It isn't hard to understand why: Angier has written a highly unconventional, imaginative biography, in which she is herself a character at times, and tells us almost as much about what it's like to write a biography as about the life of Primo Levi. She has also dared to use her own intuition -coupled with, and informed by, her scrupulous research and reflection -- to deduce things that Levi, a very private man, did not himself talk about. Finally, she has clearly angered the people who do not want to believe that Levi killed himself; it is impossible to believe, after one has read her, that his fall from the landing of his apartment building in Turin was accidental. Perhaps even more disturbing to those who saw him as some kind of radiantly sane figure is her sorrowful conclusion that he did not do it because, or primarily because, of what he had suffered in Auschwitz.
   The portrait of him that emerges is of a man who was not the secular saint, the avatar of reason, that his readers have supposed, but something greater: a tragically repressed man who struggled with overwhelming depression all his life (except, ironically, as Angier tells us, when he was in Auschwitz), triumphing not so much in his person as in the great books in which he refused to give way to it. It seems a more amazing accomplishment that a deeply troubled, self-doubting, conflicted man should have produced those masterful works of illumination and sanity than if he had simply been the serene figure of his readers' imaginings. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that literature of the high order of Levi's does not come out of an effortlessly serene mind. Angier makes it clear what a conscious artist he really was.

   Though she sometimes hammers her point home rather than allowing the reader to arrive at his own conclusions about the conflicts that lay at the heart of Levi, it seems impossible that anyone will ever come closer to penetrating the mystery of the man.




3. Carole Angier deserves the thanks of anyone seriously interested in the life of this strange and amazing man who helped and continues to help mankind to deal with the massive trauma of World War II and, further, with all attempts since then to kill the soul. She has spent years in attempting to discover him, in assessing what is factual, what can be conjectured, and what is unlikely about this man who was so reticent and whose family and friends are devoted to respecting his privacy and that of his family. However, it is true that a great man belongs to the world too.

   Unfortunately the world will not tolerate the fact that he was human and seems not to want to forgive him for taking his own life, as appears likely, especially in view of his call for help to Rabbi Toaf shortly before his death. Myth does not grow well in the presence of fact, and the facts that Carole Angier has tirelessly gathered will enrich our understanding immeasurably but have disappointed some. This seems true too regarding her altogether modest and to my mind reasonable and well-founded speculations as to his motivations and of the emotional flow of his life. Levi himself saw this coming, said that he was not a "guru" and could not bear the weight of such a role.

   She seems to me to have come to central and moving understandings of his surroundings. One can only stand in awe of the amount of information she has absorbed in her attempt to make the most accurate portrayal of the influences impinging upon him. Her depiction of the Auschwitz environment is as complete as I have ever seen; her understanding of how there could be non-shameful fellowship there which would turn to shame when viewed by the outside world; her understanding of the sad fate of the Samaritan Lorenzo, who could not tolerate his life after Auschwitz, that this is how heroism is, "a historical glory but a personal burden." True for Lorenzo and for Primo Levi as well.

   It has become fashionable in Primo Levi circles to reject absolutely studies of him, as the previous biography by Anissimov, which are in any way flawed. But the truth is we owe a debt of gratitude to her as well; she roughed in the picture and indicated areas that need to be understood. Primo Levi induces in his readers a protective possessiveness; everyone who reads and loves him wants to rescue him from the imperfect perception that has just been promulgated. This is sainthood in formation. But he was not a saint; he was an imperfect and therefore all the more amazing human being.

   Carole Angier has given us a relentlessly factual, moving, and gracefully written portrayal of this complex man. This is the best of biography. She deserves our thanks also for rendering him as we feel he would have liked, in shades of gray, but gray composed of flashes of brilliance mixed with the most horrifying black. Levi was a true Perseus, able to look at the face, see down the throat, of the terrifying Gorgon, able to return and to summon up the courage to tell us the revolting horror. Carole Angier in her remarkable book has helped us to understand the formation of the man who did it, how he could stand it, and what it cost him and those around him.




4. As awful as current events seem to be, with unsettled questions about who is most likely to die next dominating much of the news, this book takes a look at how a great writer managed, as best he could, for a time. Applying political psychology to figures who assumed some importance in our evaluation of the most catastrophic events in the twentieth century can still be disconcerting, as I myself might be the worst example. Part of the joke of MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK was that a 19-year-old G.I. grunt in Nam might say things that you would never expect to hear from the kind of genius who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it in the manner of Primo Levi in THE PERIODIC TABLE, which was an American best-seller when it was translated into English.

   Carole Angier seems very English and aiming for an audience at a university level of views, far removed from the concerns of those Americans who need a little more control over what is happening in the world, as expressed in an article in The New York Times of March 31, 2003, of a situation which is assumed to be temporary:

   Eleven days into the American-led war here, the narrow, once fertile crescent of territory that gives Iraq its only outlet to the sea remains a land of insecurity and ambivalence, devoid of the euphoria that American and British soldiers hoped to encounter in southern Iraq.

   People who experienced a sense of euphoria in reading Primo Levi's reflections on life as an understanding of chemical elements are sure to find THE DOUBLE BOND by Carole Angier dismal evidence that Primo Levi's life remained "a land of insecurity and ambivalence," and that the inability to write which marked his final days was primarily a lack of the sense of euphoria that newspaper reporters Marc Santora and Craig S. Smith, writing for the Times, had assumed that Americans would expect for those encountered in great historical events.

   This is a big book with a tremendous index, but most people will find that few of the people listed in the index are familiar to them, though two lines are required for the pages on "Americans," as distinct from the three lines for "America/United States." There are also listings for "Britain" and "England," but no extended discussion of the controversy there, in which David Irving is listed for a single page, on the book, HITLER'S WAR. American and England are such outlying areas in the scope of Levi's concerns that the description of his "barrage of articles" (p. 603) trying to counter Holocaust denial seems obsessed with the French. THE DOUBLE BOND is hardly neutral, but mentions such disconcerting facts as that Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was Vichy's commissioner of Jewish affairs. "Darquier was eighty-five years old and clearly senile, he said; since he himself had sent 70,000 French Jews to their deaths, he was hardly a disinterested party." (p. 603). The word "disinterested" here must primarily mean disinterested in the truth. I just received news that a newsman, Peter Arnett, (I am the face), was fired by an American network for talking in Baghdad on Iraqi TV. The standard applied in his case was hardly whether he was still capable of thinking of interesting things to say, but more along the lines of whether other people ought to be given the opportunity to believe what he was thinking.

   In these interesting times, MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK is the worst possible point of view because its interest is primarily in laughing. Primo Levi could never have written MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, because he did not have the personal interest in pursuing that situation past its most absurd conclusion, that geopolitics could be responsible for the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese without ultimately accepting any responsibility for the fate of the survivors. Levi had math for Europe: "There had been 17 million Jews in Europe in 1939, and 11 million in 1945: where were the missing 6 million?" (p. 603). There might be fewer people in Iraq in a few months than there were a month ago, but Levi is a poor candidate (he's dead, you know) for thinking that anyone could be more disinterested in that than he is.

   On the question of therapeutic value of trying to provide attention to those who need it most, the tangled web in this book is tied to older lives: "from 1978 onwards his depressions were triggered very largely by his mother's decline, and by its consequences. But it was also not true, because neither was natural or external. The truth is that his own relationship with his mother was pathological; and so was the level of care Lucia required them both to give. These together were quite enough to depress him on their own." (p. 602). This is entirely like his relationship to "those who denied the crimes he had devoted his life to recording. They, and they alone, brought out in him absolute intolerance; and a violence of language (`senile', `stupid', `mad') which was to him the essence of the Lager, and normally beyond the pale. The appearance of Faurisson and his ilk was the deepest shock to him: perhaps as deep as the shock of Auschwitz itself. These new Nazis lived in peace and safety, unlike the original ones." (p. 604). Having experienced a bit of shock ourselves, it is not too surprising that some governments have an interest in bringing a bit of shock to Iraq, but hardly like the shock Levi brought when he died in the house where he had been born, Corso Re Umberto 75, "built in the good middle-class areas of Turin around the turn of the century." (p. xxiv). This book honors his life, and is a profound appreciation of the nature and meaning of his death, too.




5. If I were to take you on a tour of my home town and tell you the life story of everyone we met (going back several hundred years in instances) you would quickly overload. "Now who is this again?" you would say. Or "why exactly does that matter?"
   So will you find yourself in Ms. Angier's sprawling parade of peripheral characters, all dredged up, it seems, in apology for the blaring fact that all those whose testament would really matter here aren't talking, for whatever reason.
   Imagine your own life story told from the fragments of those who really only knew you in passing - a girl you dated once, a bully, a high school teacher, a distant cousin. All called upon to comment on your reasoning, your justification in certain actions. All treated as expert witnesses. Some, you might be forced to admit, will come painfully close to the truth. Others way off the mark - only laughable speculations. But who, in your absence, could sort out the one from the other.
   A good biographer, you would hope.
   Ms. Angier is quite capable of writing beautifully, as witnessed in her preface to this book. She has a blazing passion for all things Levi. And she is obviously capable of extensive research. Which leaves us with mountains of detail, oh so much detail. And some convincing passages.
   But actually, after several hundred dry, dry pages, I find myself looking, again and again, for Primo. That vitality of soul demonstrated in his own writings.
   And that is, alas, where I am returning. The horses's mouth. With the wheat already separated from the chaff.