reviews - Jewish Book Council

REVIEWS
Adolf Burger
Frontline Books, 2009. 288 pp. $39.99
ISBN: 978-1848325234
32 Jewish Book World Spring 5770/2010
Autobiography and Memoir
THE DEVIL’S WORK-
SHOP: A MEMOIR
OF THE NAZI
COUNTERFEITING
OPERATION
Although The Devil’s Workshop is described
as a memoir of the Nazi counterfeiting
operation based in the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp between 1942–1945, Adolf Burger’s
book is much more than that. Burger was
arrested by the Nazis in Slovakia and subsequently
sent to Auschwitz. He describes what
life was like for Jews under the government of
Monsignor Joseph Tiso, a Catholic priest, and
his ersatz SS group, the Hlinka guards. He gives
a vivid description of life in Auschwitz, where
his 22 year old wife was sent to the gas chamber.
He tells how Jewish “kommandos” were
assigned to rob the dead of their dignity in
Birkenau—shearing their hair, extracting gold
fillings from their teeth, and so on. Berger also
provides a harrowing picture of the Nazi treatment
of the Gypsy camp at Birkenau—all in all
a searingly graphic description of Auschwitz.
He tells how Jewish “kommandos” were
assigned to rob the dead of their dignity in
Birkenau—shearing their hair, extracting
gold fillings from their teeth, and so on.
The second part of the memoir deals with
the Nazis’ attempt to forge millions of British
pounds sterling in order to weaken the British
currency. Toward that end, the Reich Security
Service organized a forgery workshop in the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The Nazi
creation of this economic weapon entailed the
recruitment of Jewish prisoners from selected
camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravenbruck,
Mauthausen, and Theresienstadt, who
were transferred to Sachsenhausen. The criteria
for those selected was that they had some experience
with the printing trade, and this was
how Adolf Burger was saved from eventual
death in Auschwitz (the memoir never explains
why Jewish prisoners alone were chosen). All
told, the project included 142 Jewish inmates
who were forced to forge not only British
paper money but also American bank note,
worth billions, as well as bonds, stamps, and
other documents. Accompanying his experiences
in “Project Bernhard,” named after the
SS supervisor of this criminal enterprise, Burger
and the publisher have provided a large
assortment of primary documents, rare photos
of the main participants in the operation, and
of prisoners incarcerated in the various concentration
camps.
If “Project Bernhard” sounds familiar, it is
because the book served as the basis for the
award-winning film 2007 film “The Counterfeiters.”
This riveting book is essential for
our understanding of a relatively unknown
chapter of the Holocaust. JF
DEVOTION:
A MEMOIR
Dani Shapiro
HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. 256 pp. $24.99
ISBN: 978-0-162834-4
Dani Shapiro lives with endless questions.
Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family,
she believes she has escaped that “stifling”
world. Yet she finds that every time she
touches something that reminds her of that
world, she has the urge to cry and then experiences
a disarming sense of peace. Instead of
seeking further in that direction, she runs
from those feelings, perceiving them to be
nothing more than the comforting memories
of childhood. Thus, her search continues.
Neither AA meetings nor yoga and meditation
yield much tranquility. Finally, a series of
...her depiction of her walk
through shame, guilt, pain, darkness,
and light is beautifully told.
losses and near losses lead Shapiro to realize
that the journey is rewarding only if “...there
is value in simply standing there—this too—
whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping
all around.” Later she concludes that
each of us is “full of longing, reaching out
with our whole selves for something impossible
to touch. Still, we are reaching, reaching.”
While one may have wished for Shapiro to
reveal a return to her roots, her depiction of
her walk through shame, guilt, pain, darkness,
and light is beautifully told. DS
EATING ANIMALS
Jonathan Safran Foer
Little Brown, 2009. 352 pp. $25.99
ISBN: 978-0-316-06990-8
Everything about factory farming is illuminated
in Foer’s first major work of nonfiction,
which attempts to help us make more
informed choices about what we eat. Motivated
by the question of what to teach his first
son about food, Foer set out on a three year
journey to learn where the meat on our plate
comes from. His findings are startling.
The author feeds us the gory details of the
lives of factory-farmed animals. His first hand
descriptions are vivid and striking in their
gruesomeness. But this book is about much
more than the gore that surrounds our meals.
Foer explores the environmental impact of factory
farming (“animal agriculture...is the number
one cause of climate change”), he describes
the way in which large-scale health threats are
linked to factory farming (H1N1 aka swine
flu), he probes into the waste, the humanitarian
violations, and the ethical dilemmas surrounding
the process by which many of us fill
our dinner plates. He also debunks the myth of
“free-range” and tells us exactly what is in our
chicken...and it’s not just chicken.
Foer is a fiction writer and portions of the
book come to life the way his novels do. Beautiful
passages describe the social and even ritualistic
aspects of sharing meals (Passover seders).
He begins the book with a powerful story of his
grandmother turning down a piece of pork
even while she was starving during the war. “If
nothing matters, there’s nothing to save,” she
told him. He ends the book with these very
words, and the chapters in between tell us
what, exactly, we are choosing when we choose
to eat certain meats, and why it matters.
Foer uses some of his trademark literary
devices in this book—long lists (chapter 3,
Words/Meaning), changes in narrative voice (he
uses transcripts from his interviews with farmers
without indicating who is speaking). These gimmicky
devices make for a disjointed and sometimes
tiresome reading experience, but they are
well-worth the effort. Whatever is said of this
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