Customer Reviews

On Burning Ground

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What can I add to the above? Not much. I rarely read Holocaust memoirs, but this one was amazing. Michael's father, Joseph, a Talmudic scholar with blue eyes and blond hair, who tried to save his mother in Navaredok/Novogrudek Poland, failed, and fled to the forests and to Vilna. As a circumcised male in Vilna, Joseph took on the identity of a Muslim Tatar, studied Islam, and became a foreign laborer in Berlin. A hidden Jew pretending to be a Muslim living in the Nazi capital during the War. And then he enlisted in the SS!

Skakun's experiences are comparable to those of Yehuda Nir in "The Lost Childhood" and Moshe Perlman in "Europa, Europa". The crowning irony is Skakun's (almost) joining the Waffen SS in order to hide his Jewish identity, and to survive. However, there are just a few errors of background historical fact which mar "On Burning Ground". E.g., on page 203 Julius Streicher is named as the founder of the Nazi paper "Volkische Beobachter". This is wrong. Streicher founded "Der Sturmer". Volkische Beobachter was an outgrowth of "Munchener Beobachter", a paper purchased and re-founded by Dietrich Eckart. This is the sort of mistake that better editing might have caught. But "On Burning Ground" still stands as a riveting account of survival through quick thinking and a lot of luck.

Michael Skakun's book, "On Burning Ground", makes for a unique memoir as it is the story of his father's experiences during WWII, and not his own experiences, or even his interactions with his father. Joseph Skakun led an extremely interesting, almost unbelievable life, as he did everything he could to evade detection as a Jew and survive the war. It is a story that will leave readers amazed, questioning how anyone had the strength to do what Joseph Skakun forced himself to do.

Joseph's story begins in December 1941, when the Germans come to his town to liquidate it. He tries desperately to escape with his mother, but in the end, he is the only member of his family (as far as he knows) to survive a mass execution. Skakun escapes not once, but twice, from the ghetto, slowly making his way into Lithuania, and finally Germany, where he worked as a farm laborer. His command of several languages helped him along the way, as he gradually assumed the identity of a Muslim from the countryside, hoping that the similarities between Islam and Judaism would help him elude detection. Eventually, he realized that the only way he could guarantee his own safety from the growing suspicions of other laborers was to join the Waffen SS. As Joseph prepared to step fully into the machinery that has been responsible for the destruction of his people, he questioned his actions but knew there is no other way. If he ccould get close to the front, he could escape once and for all.

"On Burning Ground" is a fascinating story, generally well-told, with details that bring Joseph's experiences to life. Joseph's survival is in part due to luck, but more greatly due to his resolve and his ability to forsake outwardly everything that he held dear. Michael Skakun does an admirable job telling his father's story, and examining what his father must have been going through emotionally and psychologically. I thought it an odd choice to narrate as did, refering to the main character as Father rather than taking a third or first person point of view. At times certain elements seem repetitive, but overall Skakun paints an incredible potrait of a remarkable man. It is an unique story of hope that comes from such sorrow. It is a story that needs to be told.

Michael Skakun, son of Joseph Skakun, is an American Jew writing his father's story of escape from Novogrudek in Poland during WWII. The writing is somewhat erudite, and clearly this son Michael is a well-educated American, well versed in Yiddish and Hebrew culture and languages, as well as Polish, Russian and German. Some readers may find these many foreign phrases interspersed in the text to be irritating, but I was impressed and also amused, for it revealed the strong Ashkenazi roots and identity of the son.

Michael Skakun's writing is also very meaty, very concrete and exciting, satisfying to read. His word choices and sentence structures are like chunks of good Polish stew, rather than the watered-down soups some WWII books offer.

As for the almost-unbelievable story of Joseph, his father, a Yeshiva student in a small town, who with his blonde hair and blue eyes can pass for a gentile: well, it has to be read to be believed. He sees his people slaughtered by "Nazi killers and their Baltic henchmen", yet escapes, to live as a Christian for some time, doing hard labor, then to become a Tatar Muslim, hoping that a false Muslim identity paper could explain his circumcision. In both deceptions, he must pay attention closely to the language, body movements and behavior of these two groups, so that he can mimic them properly and pass amongst them without suspicion.

In a labor camp in Germany, he finds love with a Russian named Tatyana, and his claim to fame there is as a crooner, singing in Polish and Russian. Yet in the simplest of ways he could betray his Jewish background,a s in the the chanting of a Russian song about a nightingale. He used the word "dolya", meaning destiny, for that was the version he'd always known. He sang the refrain, "He remained a luckless orphan abandoned to his destiny", whereupon a Ukrainian laborer, Ivan, grumbled "in chilly disapproval", "Don't say 'dolya', Jews like to use that word." Each small mistake in his Polish or Russian, even in memorized lyrics, could reveal his Yiddish native tongue, so he became paranoid about how he spoke to others. Tatyana took off with an Ukrainian SS man; the other laborers commiserated with him about the fickleness of beautiful women.

There are so many unexpected twists and turns in this young Jew's fate, with his cleverness and courage knowing no bounds, that the reader is gripped to the very end. Joseph Skakun's disappointment in so many different ethnic groups of Europe are based on solid experiences with them, living and working amongst them. Everywhere he faces antisemitism, which can erupt if his true birthright were known.

The complaints about this novel, that it can be confusing since the son is writing about his father, rather than having the book put in the first person: well, it can be said that it is often confusing since the writer calls the main character "Father". However, with a bit of concentration, this is no obstacle.

The writer is also uncondescending, assuming that the reader is familiar with Europe, WWII, Ashkenazi Jewish concepts and foreign languages. The influence of the father's early yeshiva education comes into each situation, as he finds himself yet again faced with difficulties, he would remember what the rabbis had taught him years earlier about life. For example, at Christmas time, at his job on a German farm as an Ostarbeiter (East-worker), a 400-lb pig is slaughtered for the feast, and Joseph is forced to help in the job of butchering. The son writes, "In ordinary times it would be unthinkable for a rabbinical student like Father to touch a swine, dead or alive. How different biblical sacrifices in the Pentateuch were from this ghastly sight!...Had not the scribe Eleazar resisted unto death the Hellenic Syrians who tried to force him into contact with the unclean animal, racking and torturing him when he refused?... For the Nazis every Jew was a Judensau."

All in all, this is one of the better Holocaust survivor books of the war, in the interesting details, academic commentary of the son, the continuous action and danger, the reflection on life done in different languages. The author is naturally prejudiced against the German language and way of life, giving even the language a jab as given to mendacity, with an example: The Horst Wessel Song, the famous Nazi marching song. Well, there is blindness in us all, so we can overlook a few silly observations as that one, comparing the magnificent language of Goethe and Schiller to the cretinous words set to a cabaret melody.

Thanks for writing, son of Joseph Skakun, and mourn not for the grandfather who couldn't make it in 1906 materialistic America! Nor the grandmother Rochelle who couldn't "find work" in Leeds, so making your father born to two Western world-returnees...

I found out only recently that my own Irish grandfather, an unhappy man in America, returned to his farm in Northern Ireland at about the age of 60, hoping to go back to his old life (leaving five kids back in San Francisco), only to find that the people and he himself had changed in his years away. He wrote poetry and yearned for his homeland all his life. I wonder if the Skakun grandfather's story could also be interesting: after four years of presumably low-level labor - ah, welcome to America when you have no money or connections!!! how else can a nation get rich without cheap immigrant labor like your grandfather to do the scheiss-jobs? - well, his shock at returning to a small Jewish shtetl in Poland must be an interesting story in itself. And then he had to survive there, too!

I encourage the author to write another book, simply because his writing style and erudition is a pleasure for us.

I have always had a deep interest in the Holocaust, I think it is because of the fact that it occured so recent in our history, it is so incredible that in our modern society, a country such as Germany was so willing to carry out such a morbid and shockingly sinister plan of brutality and murder. That ordinary citizens could be so callous and treacherous,...I am amazed!

Joseph Skakun, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, takes us on a journey into his mind numbing past. Divine intervention, solid logic and humblness, play a major role in his reason for survival.

Personally I think this story is very unique and wouldn't be surprised to see it become a movie.

This was a nice story, but it was clouded by some very philosphical rantings by the son both early in the book and at the end. Also troubling was the son's writing of his father's story. He talkes about his father, then his grandfather and grandmother, and it is difficult to follow, especially early in the story. I wish he would have written it as his father's narrative as told to him.

This is a very harrowing account on how one person survived the Holocaust. Skakun was blessed with blue eyes and blond hair, and it was fairly easy to pass himself off as an Aryan, with the exception of his circumcision. Both passing into Germany and his physical for the Waffen SS necesitated him taking a physical in the nude. I think his heightened awareness of how vulnerable he was resulted in a certain nervousness, which could have resulted in his uncovered secret identity.

This is a nice easy read about a very lucky Polish Jew. His unconventional route and his luck led to him surviving the war. Skakun credits the good deeds of his mother in his survival of the war.

No one can doubt how much Michael Skakun loves his father and how proud he is of his fathers amazing story of survival. However. I would have toned down the flowery writing, after all, in a biography there really no way of knowing all the expressions of the faces in the room, the smells, the sounds, etc. I also would have included a postscript on whether the subject of the book is still alive, where he lives, or where he spent his last days. Too many loose ends for me, but a book that is very good and worth reading.