By Diana Brement, JTNews Columnist
At least one quarter of the books received at JTNews are Holocaust related, attesting to the continuing importance of the subject. There seems to be a particular intensity to Holocaust memoirs and biographies now – one generation of witnesses has passed away. Those who remain, mostly children or young adults at that time, must feel compelled to tell their stories before memory fades.
We have the chance to read again, or perhaps anew, one of the earliest books to tackle the subject, Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel’s Legends of Our Time, recently re-issued by Schocken (paper, $12.95). This collection of autobiographical stories cover an array of topics that include, but are not limited to, the Holocaust, and have still not lost their power.
The Triumph of Wounded Souls: Seven Holocaust Survivors’ Lives, (University of Notre Dame, paper, $28; cloth, $65) is a collection of survivors’ stories as told to Bernice Lerner, who wrote this as her doctoral dissertation. Lerner doesn’t just relate history, but searches for the moral meaning in her subjects’ lives. How have they repaired themselves and the world around them? The professional and personal success of her subjects demonstrates the realm of human potential.
In 1980, Irene Eber, former professor of East Asian studies at Hebrew University, visited her father’s home town of Mielec, Poland. This was where her family had fled as refugees in 1938, after being expelled from Germany. This visit, described in The Choice (Schocken, cloth, $23, due out Aug. 3), brings back clear and painful memories of the expulsion of the town’s Jews and their forced march and transport to the camps during the bitter cold of March 1942. Eber survived in hiding and was, miraculously, found by her sister at the war’s end.
The second half of the book concerns post-war chaos. The writing is raw, expressing the difficult emotions still experienced by the author in this telling. Eber summarizes her fear poignantly: “By attempting to translate life into words, I fear that I too have contributed to forgetting.” But we don’t – we can’t – agree.
Another memoir from Anna Ornstein, a professor emeritus of child psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, has a sweeter tone. My Mother’s Eyes (Emmis, cloth, $20) began as a Passover project when Ornstein’s college-age daughter asked everyone at the seder to say something about freedom. The author’s brief essay about her Auschwitz experience was so appreciated by her family that it became a 25-year tradition, with a new essay every year. Those essays have been collected in this book, beginning with Ornstein’s recollections of an idyllic childhood in rural Hungary.
Readers of the New York Times may recognize the story of The Bielski Brothers by journalist Peter Duffy (Perennial, paper, $14.95).
“The true story of three men who defied the Nazis, built a village in the forest, and saved 1,200 Jews” is about Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski, who lived in what is now Belarus. They used their intimate knowledge of the forests around their home, first to shelter their families, but then for other Jews they rescued from ghettos. They also joined with Soviet partisans to demolish railroads, bridges and supply depots.
Rabbi Marvin Tokayer arrived in Japan in 1968 to serve as its Jewish community leader. Curious about those he was serving, inquiries led him to two remarkable tales, which he describes in The Fugu Plan (Gefen, cloth, $15.95), written with Mary Swartz. One is the plan of the title, an astonishing idea proposed by Japanese leaders in the 1930s to settle their remote province of Manchuria (seized from China in 1931) with European Jews.
The other is the even more remarkable story of Chiune Sugihara, the low-ranking Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania. He used his ability to issue visas to thousands of mostly Polish Jews by allowing them to travel to Japan and Japanese-controlled parts of China. Tokayer and Swartz tell these refugees’ stories here.
Levie Kanes wrote his book, Outrage 2000, (Gefen, cloth) specifically in response to the libel suit brought against historian Deborah Lipstadt by Holocaust denier David Irving in January 2000. Born in Nazi-occupied Holland, Kanes relates his parents’ initial resistance to the Germans, and their internment at Auschwitz. Only his mother survived, a victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s notorious and vicious experiments.
The author was “adopted” by a Dutch family, a family he never forgets. Kanes, who emigrated to Israel in the 1960s, adds something different, however. He re-creates the experiences of righteous Gentiles, the Dutch who risked their lives hiding Jews.
Reading these stories is bound to leave the reader saddened, enraged, queasy, or some combination of the three.
The antidote to these horrors is in knowing that actions are being taken to rectify some of the injustices of that time. Solace can be taken in Stewart Eizenstat’s Imperfect
Justice (Public Affairs, $16), now available in paper. Eizenstat was Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs during the Clinton administration. He became the U.S. official in charge of seeking out belated economic justice for the victims of the Holocaust through the restoration of Swiss bank accounts, looted artwork, payment for slave labor and monetary reparations based on stolen gold. His work has led to more than $578 million being distributed to 253,000 claimants, including Romas (gypsies) and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he tells the story here in great detail.