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BOOK PROFILE IN THE GRASP OF THE SHOAH: TALES OF TRAVAIL AND ITS AFTERMATH By Marcia Weiss Posner Titles are listed in alphabetical order, but reviewed according to their place in history ICON OF LOSS: THE HAUNTING CHILD OF SAMUEL BAK Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Phillips Pucker Art Publications, 2009. 83 pp. $50.00 ISBN: 978-1-879985-21-6 NITZOTZ: THE SPARKOF RESISTANCE IN KOVNO GHETTO AND DACHAU- KAUFERING CONCENTRATION CAMP Laura Weinrib, ed. and intro; Estee Weinrib, trans. Syracuse University Press, 2009. 232 pp. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0-8156-3233-7 Efraim Zuroff Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 238 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-61730-8 OPERATION LAST CHANCE: ONE MAN’S QUEST TO BRING NAZI CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE REMEMBER US: MY JOURNEY FROM THE SHTETL THROUGH THE HOLOCAUST Martin Small and Vic Shayne Skyhorse Publishing, 2009. 328 pp. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-60239-723-1 REMEMBERING SURVIVAL: INSIDE A NAZI SLAVE LABOR CAMP Christopher R. Browning W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 320 pp. $27.95 ISBN: 978-393-07019-4 Nitzotz—Just two months after the liquidation of the Kovno ghetto, a Dachau- Kaufering issue of Nitzotz appeared. Its editors were Abraham Melamed and Shlomo Frenkel Shafir. The first two issues were written by Frenkel from the BBC nightly, German broadcasts while he was in Kaufering 1 and II. These secret publications were a result of the underground meetings of the IBZ (Irgun Brith Zion) begun secretly in the Kovno Ghetto and continued in the Kaufering camps, where they were an inspiration to other Zionists in the camps. They are Hebrew language publications, a language forbidden by their occupiers, but continued in secret. The five issues of Nitzotz circulated in Dachau-Kefering that appear in this volume are a small sample of the 42 that were produced during that period. Begun in opposition to the Soviet occupation, it continued under the Nazis. Unfortunately, the bulk of IBZ archives have been lost to history. Extensive bibliography, notes, photography. Remember Us—Vic Shayne has told Martin Small’s story with clarity, sincerity, and balance—beginning with the closeness of his loving family, the traditions of the shtetl, and wisdom of one’s elders—and ending abruptly and brutally with the mad incursion of the Nazis and the shocking transformation of local anti-Semites and even neighbors, some of whom buried Small’s family alive. How could it happen? It was as if they had become bewitched and transformed into pure evil. From work camps to the partisans of the Nowogrodek forests; from Mauthausen to life as a displaced person in Italy; from fighting in Israel to ultimately coming to America, this is a must read account, with its twists and surprises, but primarily because of the ethics and mantra of a remarkable man. An outstanding memoir, with a startling ending. Afterword, epilogue, family photos, notes. Remembering Survival—Upon reading survivors’ accounts of life in ghettos, slave-labor camps, and even killing camps, one wonders how any survived. Depending on the religiosity of the testifier, they attribute either it to a miracle, to God’s intervention, to luck, to a particular person who helped them to survive, or other survival strategies. Drawing on the testimony of survivors of the Stratachowice slave labor camps in Poland, Browning describes many of these strategies. In the end, Browning agrees that those who survived often had the ties of family and neighbors to sustain and help them; those who did not usually perished. Browning also discusses the fact that despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of survivors, many of the perpetrators are acquitted. As if to reiterate that fact, the lawyer for Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk asserted that his Ukrainian client (an accessory to the murder of 29,700 Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Poland in 1943) should not be held accountable for following the orders of higher-ups in Germany, many of whom escaped punishment. Illustrations, notes, photos. Icon of Loss—To many, the paintings of Samuel Bak represent the Holocaust. Not only are they beautifully painted in an Old Master style, but their images of Holocaust devastation and tragedy are moving and unforgettable. Many of us are familiar with the photograph of a young boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, arms raised in surrender—his innocence violated by a German SS pointing a gun at him. Although this particular child happened to survive, Bak uses his image in a series of paintings to represent all the children of the Shoah, most of whom perished. Cynthia Ozick’s comments on Bak’s paintings of the boy in variations of the theme and settings, but
always with his hands up, are so apt that I usurp them here in a partial quotation: “...Never, never, never was pity so twinned with outrage, or visionary image-making so united with unforgiving historical fact...In Bak’s work there is absolute knowledge; I think he must understand that his eye and his hand are anointed.” List of Bak exhibits, galleries, museums and films. Operation Last Chance—Simon Wiesenthal is gone, but Efraim Zuroff carries on his work, described here truthfully but with a novelist’s ability to employ drama, characterizations, and description so that this account communicates the frustration and occasional triumphs of tracking down Nazi murderers, many of whom now live in empire, but the facts end there. NYU professor Zvi Ben-Dor Benite traces the unfolding of the rest of the story in legend. Post-Biblical Apocrypha, especially 2 Esdras, envisioned the Ten Tribes hidden behind mountains and a miraculous river and living proud, strong, free, and independent lives. That enviable state contrasted with the all too visible dispersion and desperation of the Jews of the Southern Kingdom after the destruction of the two Temples, and gave them hope and comfort. Where exactly were these pure, distant, hidden Jews? They were always imagined to be at the edge of the known world. As conquerors and explorers extended the boundaries of what was known, the lost tribes receded to those far horizons. Travelers in the Middle Ages, some credulous (like Benjamin of Tudela) and some deceiving (like David Reuveni), brought back stories of the tribes that suggested they were scattered from India to Ethiopia. After the European encounter with the New World, there were legends about hidden Jews in the jungles of South America, as well as speculation that native North Americans were descendants of the lost tribes. ...weaves the religious, legendary, and scientific history of this idea into a colorful and enchanting story. Sometimes a purported connection to the Tribes supported claims of privilege, as with British theories of Ten Tribes ancestry. More often, though, the belief in the persistence of the Ten Tribes resembles the Shiite faith in the occluded Twelfth Imam or the Czech national story of the Hussite warriors hidden in Mt. Blánik. Just as the Hussites are said to stand ready to aid the Czech people in their time of need, and the Twelfth Imam is to emerge to bring salvation as Mahdi, the Ten Tribes were imagined to have a large army ready to defend the Jews. They offered the consolations of strength in the face of loss, eventual triumph following defeat, succor amid distress. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite weaves the religious, legendary, and scientific history of www.jewishbookcouncil.org this idea into a colorful and enchanting story, told in scholarly detail with a deft personal touch. Bibliography, index, notes. BG URANIUM WARS: THE SCIENTIFIC RIVALRY THAT CREATED THE NUCLEAR AGE Amir D. Aczel Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp. $27.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-61374-4 Despite the intimidating title, Uranium Wars is, above all, a story about people. The author introduces us to the key players in the discovery of uranium and the history of nuclear arms, bringing us into the lives and struggles of the scientists, with brief interludes to explain some of the science (in remarkably easy and accessible language). He shows us Marie Curie (among many others) as a student searching for a Ph.D. thesis and graduating with what was the start of Nobelwinning research. He details the rivalry between Curie’s daughter, Nobel Laureate Irene Joliot-Curie, and Lise Meitner, two women racing to explain how a nucleus splits at a time when very few women dominated any scientific discipline. The relationships among the scientists bring history to life and the sections about the role of the Nazis in the arms race are gripping. Aczel ends with a look at the U.S.’s own questionable decision to drop the bomb—the final product of the scientists’ research—onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the most memorable chapters show Aczel, and the rest of the world, struggling to understand what the scientists knew and didn’t know about the intended use of their efforts, and what their feelings were when it happened. Endnotes, illustrations, insert, references. AB BOOK PROFILE comfort and luxury. It reads like fiction, but unlike fiction, it is sadly truthful and describes frustrating failures, mostly due to lack of cooperation by the governments in question, as well as successes. Just by targeting them, flushing them out from their covers, Zuroff achieves a certain level of victory, even if they are not ultimately imprisoned. Zuroff may not carry a spear or a shield, but he is a true warrior searching for justice and retribution. Marcia Weiss Posner, Ph.D., is a librarian and program director at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County HOLOCAUST STUDIES ARNOLD DAGHANI’S MEMORIES OF MIKHAILOWKA: THE ILLUSTRATED DIARY OF A SLAVE LABOUR CAMP SURVIVOR Deborah Schultz and Edward Timms, eds. Vallentine Mitchell, 2009. 243 pp. $32.50 (pbk.) ISBN: 978-0853036395 (pbk.) The history of the publication of Daghani’s diary is almost as depressing as the diary itself which, after a brief introduction, is the first part of this fascinating study. Entitled “The Grave is in the Cherry Orchard” the history describes in terse yet poetic detail life in the slave labor camp of Mikhailowka during 1942 and 1943, where the Romanian artist and his wife, Anisoara, whom he calls Nanino, are sent from their home in Czernowitz to build a strategic road for the Germans. During that year, besides the unbearable hardships they endured, Daghani, who had brought his paints and brushes with him (at the suggestion of the arresting officer), records both in English shorthand and, visually, in genre-like paintings, cruelty, occasional kindnesses, as well as portraits and interior scenes commissioned by his captors. Making their escape in 1943, the Daghanis carried the works above their heads as they waded across the Bug river and managed to get to a ghetto in Transnistria where they survived until the end of the war. The saga of the publication of this dual testament then begins. Though written in English, it was first published in Romanian in 1947. The Daghanis were then living in Bucharest. It was not until 1961 that the journal Adam: International Review published it in England in its original English. (The year before, it had been turned down by a literary agent whose comment was “good, but too few atrocities!”) Daghani’s paintings and writings would be concerned through- Spring 5770/2010 <strong>Jewish</strong> <strong>Book</strong> World 53
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