3 comments about Surviving Treblinka.

1. An exceptional account of the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

   When one visits Treblinka today, it is difficult to imagine the atrocities and slaughter depicted in this excellent book. My own personal visit to Treblinka was on a Summer's day when the sky was blue and the birds were singing. The lasting impression left on me was one of utter isolation, emptiness and an absolute thunderous silence surrounding me.

   Gone are the buildings and gas chambers, long destroyed by the Nazis in their attempt to extinguish any memory or evidence of the genocide that was perpetrated here. Apart from the symbolic cemetery and memorials and the remains of the railway station where the innocent Jews were disembarked prior to their massacre only minutes later, there is little to see apart from the location of the mass graves and the vast empty space amongst the surrounding trees where the Nazi extermination camp once stood.

   Each individual stone memorial at the site representing one Jewish community whose members perished at Treblinka. Photographs, diagrams and maps are provided which afford a valuable context and framework to assist in the readers' understanding.

   It is fitting therefore that Samuel Willenberg, one of the very few survivors of the Treblinka holocaust, has been able to provide us with his harrowing account of what actually went on there. The vast open spaces that I personally saw are here filled with maps and detailed descriptions of the hell erased by the Nazi genocide machine that killed so many innocent Jews. The procedures at this death camp from the moment that the innocents arrived at the still visible railway platform are documented in detail, until their wholesale slaughter in the gas chambers and the burning of their bodies in the burial pits not so far away.

   This moving account of the functioning of the Treblinka death camp not only speaks out for those whose lives were destroyed and who cannot speak for themselves, but it also covers the heartbreaking daily lives of those prisoners who were forced to function as vital cogs in the Nazi death machine. Further to this we have a commendable account of the uprising against the Nazis amongst these prisoners, many of whom were also killed. Very few in fact survived to escape. One of those who did survive, escape and manage to bring this moving account to our attention was Samuel Willenberg.

   The author's memoirs of Treblinka extend from October 1942 until the rebellion and his escape in August 1943, when he went into hiding in Warsaw and took an active personal part in the armed Polish underground resistance against the Nazis until the quelling of the Warsaw Uprising.

   This is a must read on this particular section of the Holocaust. Of some interest is the portrayal of the underlying Polish-Jewish relations during the Nazi occupation. This is a story that will chill you to the bone.




2. One of the great Treblinka stories, though there have been relatively few unfortanetly, this one ranks right up there with Richard Glazar's book "Trap With A Green Fence", referring to the fences that were fitted with pines and shrubs so no one could see in or out of the camp, even being used to camoflauge sections of the camp from each other. A very detailed book, it was written right after the war so the facts had to still be fresh in his mind. The book is a hard one to read but also interesting, even psycologically, as many great books are from this era of the holocaust. But everyone knows Auschwitz, and terrible that place was. But life in Treblinka was a bit different from many other camps. Many prisoners wore fashionable clothes,taken from the sorting piles of those who had been killed in the camp's diesel engine gas chambers, a far cry from the Zyclon B which was to be used extensively at camps like Auschwitz and Majdanek, not the striped pajamas that many have seen in archival footage from concentration camps. Treblinka extermination camp was a world unto itself. The tales of SS men like Kurt Franz, Kuttner, Miete,Mentz, and Hirthreiter, among a few others, are spine chilling and just udderly sadistic. All in all, you need to read this book, even if you arent totally familiar with Nazi camps. But these extermination camps, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, they were much different from any other camp in occupied Europe during WW2. Read this book!



3. 
   Samuel Willenberg is one of the few Jews who escaped from the Treblinka death camp. He provides gruesome details of what took place there. About 870,000 Jews were gassed or shot. The bodies were buried, and eventually re-exhumed and burned, up to 18,000 at a time, in massive open-air pyres. The book includes a sketch map of the Treblinka death camp, and even a photograph of German earthmoving equipment used to unearth the earlier-buried bodies.
   
   When he was first deported to Treblinka, Willenberg heard remarks from Poles about "getting turned into soap" (p. 39). He neglects to mention the fact that Poles also used such remarks in reference to themselves (as later Jews did to each other). (It subsequently turned out that this was largely apocryphal. There was, however, a factory in Danzig (present-day Gdansk) in which Germans did use the bodies of mostly Poles to make soap.)
   
   After the Jewish revolt and escape from Treblinka, the Germans' hunt was so intense that two of the Poles who helped Willenberg had already experienced a German search of their domiciles (p. 144, 147). He noticed how Germans were checking all traffic on the roads (p. 145), and also encountered a poster that warned Poles against helping any of the "typhus-bearing Jewish bandits" (p. 149). Some Poles approached by Willenberg for help were obviously so frightened that they immediately departed from him (p. 25, 28, 144). But, in spite of the death penalty for the slightest Polish assistance to Jews, local Polish peasants helped Willenberg on no less than nine separate occasions in the first days after his escape (pp. 143-on).
   
   In time, Willenberg became a member of the AL, whose Communist nature he denied (p. 181) and, for awhile, the AK. He took part in the Warsaw Uprising, repeated accusations of the NSZ killing fugitive Jews (p. 178), and then said the same thing about the AK. Interestingly, Willenberg reports a discussion with an AK officer, who produced a list of Jewish Gestapo informers about to be liquidated, and with Willenberg on the list! The list had been found in possession of a Jew who was accused of being a Gestapo agent, based on the fact that he had been caught living with a German woman (pp. 182-183). Taken literally, this suggests that at least some cases of the AK killing innocent fugitive Jews was due to faulty intelligence. (Of course, with regards to wartime espionage, underground organizations don't have the luxury of conducting detailed investigations, and some innocent people get killed because of mistaken inferences). However, the very fact that Willenberg became an openly-Jewish member of the AK, and was allowed to survive a face-to-face accusation of an AK officer, alone should soundly refute the accusation of some (e. g., Yaffa Eliach, Oskar Pinkus) that the AK was implementing some sort of secret plan to kill all remaining Polish Jews!
   
   One particularly malicious Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about the Nazis' choice of Poland as the site of the death camps because Poles welcomed them or at least wouldn't object much to them. No doubt, this libelous canard is facilitated by the countless misleading accounts in the western press of "Polish death camps". Ironically, not only didn't the Germans seek any form of "permission" from the conquered and despised Polish untermenschen, but actually kept the death camps a jealously-guarded secret. So extreme was this secrecy that a German woman who had inadvertently been shipped to Treblinka was deliberately killed in order to protect the secret of extermination (p. 30). And to add plausibility to the fraud about Jews only being resettled for forced labor, and Treblinka only being a labor camp, the Nazis actually HAD built a nearby labor camp, Treblinka 1, to which they had been sending Poles and later some of the deported Jews (p. 9, 101, 202). Periodically, Treblinka 1 inmates were dispatched to the Treblinka death camp, but never the other way around!
   
   Certain authors (e. g., Yisrael Gutman, David Engel) have accused the Polish government-in-exile of delaying, and then understating, its reporting on the numbers of murdered Polish Jews. In his introduction, Bartoszewski puts Willenberg's experience in perspective, making it clear that only a trickle of substantive information ever escaped those extermination camps in which Polish Jews were being murdered: "Together the four death camps exterminated over 2 million Jews; we know of only two survivors from Belzec, three from Chelmno, sixty-four from Sobibor, and around forty from Treblinka." (p. 9). Even the indirect clue afforded by the odor of vast numbers of bodies being burned at Treblinka did not become reality until early 1943 (p. 17). In stark contrast to the Jews, Germans usually murdered Poles publicly. So why invoke nefarious motives to explain the fact that the Polish government-in-exile knew much more about the extent of Polish deaths than Jewish ones, and did so much earlier?
   
   Another anti-Polish canard is the one about Germans choosing Poland as the site of the death camps so that they could conveniently recruit numerous Polish volunteers to assist in the extermination of Jews. In actuality, Willenberg doesn't mention even ONE Polish collaborator serving the Germans at Treblinka! He elaborates on the work of Ukrainian collaborators numerous times, describing them as follows: "While they disliked Poles, White Russians, and Cossacks, they reserved a sizzling, boundless hatred for the Jews." (p. 56).

1 comments about Foiled!: Hitler's Jewish Olympian : The Helene Mayer Story.

1. This book tells the story of one of the 20th century's greatest Olympic foil fencers, who also taught in Oakland, CA for a while! The book is not about fencing per se, but about the life of an athlete who, through no fault of her own, fell from glory to disgrace and was forced to walk a political tightrope. It's worthwhile to remember that fencers are human beings with real struggles, even when off the piste. The book has lots of good photos, too.

2 comments about War in the Shadow of Auschwitz: Memoirs of a Polish Resistance Fighter and Survivor of the Death Camps (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. A non-Jew, author John Wiernicki was a Polish partisan and political prisoner who vividly recalls his experienced during World War II and the horrors of being incarcerated in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was in 1943 that Wernicke as a Polish underground fighter was captured and beaten by the Gestapo, then shipped to Auschwitz. A Gentile, Wernicke's chilling memoir graphically details "life" in that infamous death camp, along with his personal battle to survive both physically and morally in the face of the utter evil that was the Nazi "Final Solution" for its enemies. Especially in the face of current efforts at anti-Semitic revisionism, War In The Shadow Of Auschwitz is a critically important and welcome contribution to the growing library of Holocaust Studies, as well as being recommended for World War II European theater reading lists and reference collections.



2. "War In The Shadow Of Auschwitz" by John Wiernicki.
   Subtitled: "Memoirs Of A Polish Resistance Fighter And survivor Of the Death Camps". Syracuse University Press, 2001.
   
   In the dry September of 1939, Janusz Wiernicki was a young cadet who had just completed his freshman year at the Military Academy in Lwów, Poland. If the weather had been wet, the German 1939 invasion would have been slowed down, but it was a dry September. The first 88 pages narrate the rapid defeat of Poland and the shock experienced by this young boy as his entire world disintegrates.
   
   His options rapidly diminish. He can not stay at the "manor" of his family; (the Irish would consider his family part of the "Landed Class"). In the woods, he becomes part of a loose organization of Polish Army guerrillas ...Resistance Fighters ... who, it appears, spend their time wandering aimlessly from place to place. There is one "fire fight" where both Germans and Poles take casualties, but, interestingly, most of the time, Janusz is assessing the charms of the various young ladies he encounters. Youth will overcome!
   
   Janusz Wiernicki goes home on leave to visit his relatives and is arrested by the Gestapo as he is just about to return to the Resistance Fighters. Janusz was not successful in hiding his second set of forged identity papers.
   
   The remainder of the book, some 169 pages (or 66%) deals with the witness of Janusz Wiernicki to the inhumanity of the Nazi Germans towards the Poles, towards anyone Slavic, towards the Jews, towards Nazi defined "Untermensch". The author recounts how enforced starvation in the prison camps made food the chief subject of discussion, with the complementary issue being the avoidance of rigorous labor which would hasten starvation. Perhaps Wiernicki survived because his Grandmother was able to send him food packages.
   
   In one instance, Wiernicki used his Grandmother's food to procure a pair of contraband binoculars. Then, the author recounts how he used the binoculars to watch as Hungarian Jews were offloaded from the trains, sorted into the immediate death line and into the line where they would live for a short while more, and the horror of seeing families being sent, left to death, while some were sent, right to life. This eye-witness account is horrifying, but is the heart of this book.
   
   As the war winds down, Wiernicki and his fellow inmates are made to trek from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. At the very end, (of the book and the war), Janusz runs away from the line of prisoners trudging along. The German guards shoot but miss him. He runs and runs. He describes taking a pistol from a young German soldier, a dead young soldier in the side car of a motorcycle. Then he meets with a vehicle bearing the white star of the American Army. Witness.

5 comments about The Hours After: Letters of Love and Longing in War's Aftermath.

1. We typically don't write or receive personal letters anymore. That is just one of many reasons why this book, with the different life experiences Kurt and Gerda W. Klein had during the war, is so compelling. Imagine this 25 yr. old U.S. serviceman helping this young woman, who had grown from adolescence to adulthood on a Nazi death march, come to grips with who she is and what's to become of her. The book provides a first hand account and perspective through their letters to eachother, as the hopeful re-building of countries and lives is surrounding them. This is a must read, especially poignant in the tenuous world situation we all find ourselves in, post Sept. 11th. The fact that these two young people married and built a life together is a wonderful love story.



2. I think this was a okay book. It was very boring and kind of dragged. But I do like there love story, it was very touching.



3. This book is a very good read. It shows the compassion of love and trust. I am one that enjoys reading letter so this was perfect book for me. This book is comprised of letters written back and forth between the two authors. It is completely nonfiction. It shows the two peoples raw and bare emotions. It does take a while to read. It is not an extremely long book but it takes a good while to read. It is an easy read. The word choices arent difficult and the sentences aren't very complex. This sweet books talks about the way a couple met and lived through post war in Europe. The man was her liberator. She was a victim of the Nazi's cruel treatment. They became good friends while she was being treated in a medical hospital. As their relationship grew it became more loving and caring than anyone could have ever thought possible. They fell in love just as he was going to be sent back home. As this tragic point in the story happens it is counter acted by a wedding proposal and a vow for a marriage and a wonderful life together. As he left Europe, it started the wonderful wait until they could be married in Paris in 1946.



4. After I read Gerda's "All But My Life", I absolutely had to read this book. I had to know more! "All But My Life" and "The Hours After" are two of the best books I have ever read.



5. Ever since discovering Anne Frank back in Junior High School, I've always been interested in books about the Holocaust. I recently finished The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy. It's a very well written and important story about the Holocaust. And when I finished it I wanted to know what happened after the end of the book. What happened after the Jews were liberated? Everything from their previous lives was gone, their homes destroyed their families dead, murdered. What would they do? I hadn't read anything about after liberation.
   
   The Hours After tells the wonderful and uplifting story of what happened to Gerda Weissmann after liberation. The story is revealed to us through letters between Gerda and her fiancé, Kurt Klein, one of the American soldiers who liberated her from a slave-labor camp in Czechoslovakia in May 1945.
   
   At first I didn't care for the format of the book. I felt it had a sometimes awkward rhythm, going back and forth from Gerda's voice to Kurt's but at some point that feeling disappeared and all I could focus on was what would happened next.
   
   I thought their letters to each other were beautiful, especially Kurt's. What a wonderful gift they have in these letters. I also thought that the way the letters were written was interesting, maybe it was the way they translated from German to English but they seemed very old fashioned even for 1945.
   
   I thought it interesting that Gerda said her gushing (about her love and affection for Kurt) and sharing her deepest feelings was impolite. Later she asked to be forgiven for the burden she imposes on him by discussing the loss of her parents and the disappointment she's caused her uncle by not asking his permission to marry. I wonder the origins of such formality? And sometimes I wish there was just an iota of it left in our culture today.
   
   I was moved by the story of Gerda's Grandfather who was exiled to Siberia and how she drew strength from his experience. Gerda is an amazing person, very smart, she never seems to get frustrated by the bureaucrats who make her emigration to the United States so difficult. And when she had the opportunity to exact some justice or revenge (in the case of her landlady and her son) she could only feel empathy for them. What an amazing and compassionate soul!
   
   The process of preparing all of their papers for their marriage and Gerda's emigration to the US was excruciatingly prolonged! Gerda and Kurt communicated primarily by sloooow snail mail that was delivered via go-betweens until April 1946 (with the exception of a few telegrams). How different from our lightning fast communications and overnight deliveries of today.
   
   A wonderful and uplifting story!

No comments about Judith Resnik.

No comments about The Gaon of Vilna: The Man and His Image.

5 comments about Alex Building a Life.

1. Alex's writings convey powerfully and persuasively, an attitude and tone of voice that seems to be heard less and less. It's a voice that says that life is a gift to be lived fully, joyfully, spontaneously; that Judaism has the power and depth to challenge and enrich every Jew, and through them to improve the world; that doing for others is the most effective--the only--way of fulfilling yourself; and that Israel is the Jewish home and that instead of rejecting it for its faults we should work to correct them. Alex writes beautifully and honestly. His drawings are vivid and personal



2. Alex's story is the definitive account of a true lover of Israel. Any one who has had thoughts about their own Zionist, Jewish beliefs must refer to this book for nothing less than spiritual guidance. Live life to the fullest through Alex's shoes, and cry when you realize his last letter was never finished. Alex Singer was a true hero to Israel and the Jewish people all over the world, as he made sure that one more family on the Lebanese border in 1987 could sleep soundly. Am Israel chai.



3. Alex Singer was an American Jew who volunteered to fight in the Army of Israel. He did this because he believed in the Jewish's people's need for , and right to a historical homeland. He during his period of service acted with courage and real human consideration of others. He was not a hater but a person who sought peace, and the human face of the enemy.
   He represents the best of the Jewish people in their struggle to return and build their ancient homeland . He embodied the highest both in humane consideration and dedication to Jewish ideals.
   This volume of his letters collected posthumously by his parents tells of his story and struggle in a deeply moving way.



4. If this book had been simply about an IDF soldier who made aliyah, it would have been interesting at that. However, this book is that and so much more. It is an opportunity to experience how determined a young soldier can be, how focused and centered on his beliefs a young man can be and how warm and compassionate a young Jewish son, brother and friend can be... in his own words, at the time he was making these decisions and having these experiences. It is an opportunity to experience Alex's Zionism, compassion and strength. Every letter/journal entry written by Alex moved me and I am not often moved by books and by people whom I have never met. I recommend this book as highly as I possibly can.



5. This book is a gem. I had bought it while on a trip in Israel, where we visited Alex's parents, met his brother and also went to his grave to pay our respects. Alex represented the qualities of a hero who fought for what he believed in and in the end paid with his life for Israel, the Jewish state. I loved reading about the many stories that made up his life during the army, especially the story about looking for the Teffilin. You will immediately be placed in Alex's world once you dwelve into this book. I highly recommend it. I couldn't put it down.

No comments about Jews in Music from the Age of Enlightenment to Mid 20th Century.

3 comments about Harry Haft: Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. Harry Haft: Survivor Of Auschwitz, Challenger Of Rocky Marciano is the unique biography of a Jewish man who survived the Nazi concentration camps while being forced by brutal German officers to fight his fellow prisoners -- to lose was to die. Haft was only sixteen when he was sent to the concentration camps; four years later, he barely escaped with his life, and killed German civilians while struggling to survive. Prone to fits of violent temper, made worse by the permanent scars of the unspeakably inhuman treatment he endured, Harry Haft decided to take his talent for fisticuffs into the professional boxing ring. But in an era when boxing was heavily infiltrated by organized crime, gangsters threatened Haft with execution unless he lost his fight with heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. Written by Harry Haft's son, Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano gives a complete picture of a flawed yet courageous human being, a survivor beyond measure, and is highly recommended for biography and holocaust studies shelves.



2. This is an impressive addition to holocaust literature. The life of Harry Haft is well worth telling. When he entered Auschwitz he was forced to fight other Jews in bare-knuckle boxing bouts for the entertainment of the SS officers. These battles were usually fought to the death of one of the fighters.
   
   This is quite a different story than that usually told. He survived, and eventually escaped, likewise not a common occurance. He eventually made his way to America and decided to take his boxing skills into the professional arena here. In boxing at that time, the fighters were under the control of organized crime and he was eventually told to lose a match or he would lose his life.
   
   All of this left permanent mental scars on Mr. Haft that were never truly removed. This book is also a story of the life of his son, the author who in writing this probably understands his father better than he did before.



3. The premise that this guy was so formidable that his life was threatened if he didn't take a dive against future champion Rocky Marciano is ludicrous. First, Marciano was an unknown who had only had 17 fights at the time, fighting out of New England, hardly the Mecca of the boxing world of the 1940-50 era. At the time of the fight you could have got odds of 500-1 that Marciano would never be heavyweight champion. Why would the mafia or anyone else threaten someone with death to lose to him?
   
   Also, Haft had lost 6 of his last 7 fights when he met Marciano. In fact he lost to Roland LaStarza just before the Marciano bout. Does his son want to claim he took a dive against LaStarza also? After all, Roland was 32-0 at the time, a much more likely prospect for heavyweight champion than Marciano. And he was also Italian and fighting out of New York.
   
   Three fights before he fought Marciano Haft lost to a guy who was 20-38-8! Come on, why in the wildest flight of fantasy would organized crime think they needed to threaten someone who was on a rapid downhill slide unless he lost to an unranked fighter who had only had 17 fights?
   And why would it be to Marciano, the unknown from the little town of Brockton rather than the relatively well known Roland LaStarza of New York, who really was on the fast track to the heavyweight title shot?
   
   Haft finished with a record of 13-7-0 with 7 KO's, losing 7 of his last 8 fights, with Marciano being the final loss. He was knocked out in 5 of those 7 losses, all in a span of six months. It is likely his license was suspended after the Marciano fight to protect him.
   
   It's a fabrication to sell a book. If LaStarza had been champion instead or Marciano, it would probably claim he took the dive against Roland instead.

No comments about Between Berlin and Slobodka: Jewish Transition Figures from Eastern Europe.