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Lucien's Story: A Memoir

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This is the story of Lucien Duckstein, an 11 year old boy in Paris who is deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with his mother because they are Jewish. It is also the story of Lucien Duckstein, a sixty year old scientist who eventually comes to deal with the experiences he underwent in Bergen-Belsen and the Drancy internment camp. He explores the price those childhood experiences exacted in his adulthood, especially in his dealings with his wife, children, family and the outside world. He acknowledges the cost of having created a persona which could survive life in the camps. His language is sparse, but eloquent and his pain is evident in the simplicity of his words. This is a short (60page), volume that is uncluttered by the irrelevant, that flows from the start and is stark and frightening in it's descriptions of what it was like to be a French Jew in Paris and later. His use of the present to play off against the past merely highlights the horrors that he experience

A memoir -- A gateway into the world of Lucien leads the reader through the tunnels of his mind as the horrors of the past ricochet into the present. Without sentimentality this story changes the awareness of even the most knowledgeable reader. The present is honed by these echoes of the past. Beautifully, albeit adroitly, written, the bones of his experience are clean, sparse and strong. We are helped to understand the unimaginable

We've all read or heard about stories from the Jewish Holocaust until we're a bit tired of them. But when I read this I was astonished. Written by a renowned engineer, it describes his experience as a Jewish boy in Nazi-controlled Paris: taken along with his family at midnight, shipped to a holding area in France for some months, then off to a death camp. He survived by days, liberated by the Russians, who knew not to give the starving prisoners rich food immediately. Then returned to his old apartment with his family and the neighbors pretend nothing much happened....life continued. He suppresses his experience and gets on with life, only telling this story decades later.

Simply but powerfully told, there is little philosophizing. Rather a straight-forward account of what happened to him. Recommended not just for this episode in Western civilization, but for the writing style.

A memoir -- A gateway into the world of Lucien leads the reader through the tunnels of his mind as the horrors of the past ricochet into the present. Without sentimentality this story changes the awareness of even the most knowledgeable reader. The presnt is honed by these echoes of the past. Beautifully, albeit adroitly, written, the bones of this experience are clean, sparse and strong. We are helped to understand the unimaginable