Customer Reviews

Schindler's Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the most popular films of 1993 was Steven Spielburgs Schindlers List, the story of
one mans fight against the Nazi killing machine that we know today as the Holocaust. As the
film closed, the audience saw many of the survivors and their families as they gathered at
Oskar Schindlers grave to pay homage to this Righteous Gentile.

Like many others in the audience, I wondered what had happened to those men and women
after the war and the experiences that had not made the movie. Now I know. In Schindlers
Legacy, Elinor Brecher has shared the fascinatingand horriblestories of over 40 of those
who eventually came to live in America.

They tell, for example, of the almost random nature of their survival. Several tell of times
when the German guards lined up their work detail and shot every fifth person. Many were
away from home on some kind of errand when the Gestapo came and took away the rest of
their family. We read of Celena Karp who was selected by the notorious Josef Menegle for the
line heading to the gas chambers. For some reason, he decided to remove some from the
doomed line. When Celena reached him the second time, she begged him, Let me go, and
for some inexplicable reason, he did!

In these accounts, we learn again of the horror of the concentration camps. Remember the boy
who survived several searches by hiding in the filth of the latrine? This was no product of the
writers imagination; Roman Ferber tells his own story in his own words. Others relate the
beatings they survived, the rides in unheated and unventilated cattle cars, of the friends they
carried to the ovens. That they survived is nothing less than a miracle.

These arent just the stories of the camps, however. We learn more about the people and the
lives they lived before the warthe young couple who married only days before their arrest,
the woman who had to give her new-born son to a Catholic family in order to survive herself,
and the men and women who watched in horror as their parents and their brothers and sister
were dragged away or shot before their eyes.

After these experiences, what kinds of people did they turn out to be? Some have never
forgiven the German people for what happened, while others have miraculously put the past
behind them. And some are so traumatized that they have never been able to watch the film
based on their experiences.

This is a book that needs to be read!

Oskar Schindler, one remarkable man who outwitted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than most of the heroic rescuers during WWII.

Oskar Schindler was one of only a handful who surfaced from the chaos, and generations will remember him for what he did ...

When asked, Schindler told that his metamorphosis during the war was sparked by the shocking immensity of the Final Solution. In his own words: "I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more."

Oskar Schindler died in Frankfurt on the 9th of October, 1974, at an age of 66. From 1939 to the day he died he was such in love with his Jewish people, that he wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. His friend, a Schindler-Jew, Poldek Pfefferberg asked him shortly before he died, why he wanted to be buried here. He answered :"My children are here ....."

I'm stressing this to all, that this book is one of the greatest books I've ever read. It's very intense and real. Because of the way these Holocaust survivors explain their experiences at the concentration camps, it makes you feel as if you could've been there. The way that these survivors have achieved great goals in there lives after the Holocaust, is amazing. I recommend this book for everyone to read to get a better understanding of the Holocaust. This book is truely amazing.

I was really moved by this. It was almost as riveting as another book I read recently called Hitler's Silent Victims. I recomend this book highly.

When the film SCHINDLER'S LIST came out in 1993, Elinor Brecher did a remarkable thing. It occurred to her that, given her location in Florida, she might be living very near a few of the Schindlerjuden (those who were saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust) and she undertook to interview as many of them as she could for a series of articles. This remarkable book grew from that notion.

The more than 40 people whose stories make up SCHINDLER'S LEGACY tell us how close Keneally, and then Spielberg, got to the truth of their experiences in the Nazi death machine. For instance, I remember that a friend was appalled by what she saw as the manipulativeness of a scene wherein the women are taken to the showers at Auschwitz, and they are sure they are going to be gassed. After almost unbearable tension, it turns out that it really is a shower. The women who are interviewed for the book tell Brecher, and therefore us, that it really did happen in just that way. What *didn't* happen, however, was the emotional "I could have done more" scene when Schindler departed Brinnlitz at the end of the war. His departure was moving, but very low-key. We're also informed that the violence in the film is toned down considerably. If Spielberg had shown the atrocities that really occurred at the hands of the SS, the Gestapo and the Poles, before, during and after the War, he would never have been able to get the movie released.

No film or novel can touch the reminiscences of these now elderly people, some still deeply devout, others completely bereft of faith, some laughing about how they met, others still crying for lost parents, siblings and children. Only one couple in the entire book was able to tell of their children having both sets of grandparents. More often the survivors were the only ones left in their families. The cruelties they experienced in post-war "peacetime" were sometimes as gruesome as anything in the camps. The end of the War didn't mean the end of anti-semitism, or the end of the murders.

Finally, the survivors' opinions on Schindler himself are fascinating. Some give him the status of saint while others think he got more credit than he should have, and that he was actually copying another good Gentile who went unacknowledged. Many talk about the uncredited kindness of his long-suffering wife, Emilie. Most agree that were it not for that magic List, they would not be alive to debate these issues. These are people who went on to contribute in countless ways to society, history and humanity. Their fortitude, gumption and plain luck are to be celebrated, and I believe that Elinor Brecher has done that beautifully here.

This book tells us about the lives of a number of the people who were saved thanks to Oskar Schindler (Schindler's List (the book), Schindler's List (Widescreen Edition)). Some went on to become pillars of society, others to lead rather ordinary lives, and some to lead somewhat messy lives. But you know what the most important thing is? THEY GOT TO LIVE THEIR LIVES! Just like the rest of us, they had a chance to get on with the business of living. Just like the rest of us, some did better than others; some made good choices and some made poor choices. But the important thing is that they had the opportunity. Their lives were not snuffed out in some Nazi death camp. Oskar Schindler gave them the chance to do like the rest of us are doing: just living. That, my friends, was something worth doing!

This book of course takes off where the movie left off. It tracks down and interviews a select group of the survivors on Shindler's famous list. Many of whom of course refused to be interviewed, others would consent to do so only anonymously, and still others only after intense prodding. All led interesting, but as one would expect, unusually tormented lives. Most were successful; were in the twilight of their lives; and somehow had managed to put the experience behind them, that is as much as that could be done - meaning most of them buried the experiences deep in their subconscious, not to be disturbed except in their dreams or under extreme stress or duress.

Alex Rosen's story resonated the most with me and was the most interesting of the lot. Alex is my age, and was the youngest among the survivors, and was the one depicted in the movie as the young Jewish ghetto denizen. Age-wise I can empathize with him and imagine, vicariously, what it must have been like to go through that experience at his age. His story is interesting for several other reasons as well: First he is the one in this book who tried to make sense out of the holocaust experience as an existential, if not as a theological problem -- not at all unlike the way that Elie Wiesel and Victor Frankl did in their books, but Alex takes an entirely different approach. He believes there are knowable answers too the questions many Jews posed in the aftermath of the holocaust experience: Why me? Why the Jews? And why was it so horrible? His belief, that he can find the answers to these questions is expressed best on page 23:

"If we take the premise that there is a God, then everything that happens is just, because it's His game not mine. There has to be a legitimate reason by His way of looking at it, not by mine. There has to be a legitimate explanation - that we can understand through reason - why it happened the way it happened, why all those people died and I am still alive. But I don't know those answers right now. I can't tell you. It's knowable; it's not one of the mysteries of life. It's an answer that will eventually dawn on me."

Second, his story is interesting because he eventually divorced his Jewish wife and married a black one, with which together they raised three children from split families, doing so in Queens New York. His primary family, of Jewish holocaust survivors, incredibly, and incongruously, never quite forgave him for committing this violation of the America's racist (and apparently Jewish) protocol? But finally, he gives an account of his experience that adds a poignant depth and meaning that again parallels that given by Frankl in his book, one that makes an outsider almost understand what the holocaust was like.

As he puts it on page 26:

"When the war ended, the trauma set in, because you are now among a different species of human being. You think: "So if this is life now, what the hell was that? What the hell was that all about? It's difficult for people to understand, up until that time, I was perfectly well-adjusted in all that misery. I never had a sleepless night [in the camps]. Yes, I was beaten. Yes, there was trouble. Yes, I was scared. But this was life, and you were scared when you lived. It was dangerous. It was hard. You saw ugliness. You saw women beat up. You saw people shot, killed, hanged. You saw dead bodies carried in wheelbarrows. You saw horrible things. But this was normal life."

The subtext of course is that: When there appear to be no easy way out, human beings simply adjust; they adapt and find ways to live with even the worse kinds of dehumanization. They do so simply because they have been socialized to do so; and simply because it then becomes a normalized way of life for them.

In this one poignant statement, Alex reveals the secret of, and the template for, repetition of the holocaust: According to this statement, it means simply that we don't really need the Nazis and their concentration camps for the holocaust to recur. It can occur almost anywhere and in any society, and at any time. It is simply a process of colonizing the mind of those targeted through tyranny, and back it up with force, and an ideology of racism or other forms of intolerance, and the world of humanity simply shuts down altogether, period.

Five Stars.

I was grateful to come across this book and learn about the lives of the survivors post-liberation. I wish we had an even newer update since this one is 16 years old, but it still gave a wealth of information and personal stories from the survivors. What a joy to hear their voices and learn about how they ended up on the list, as well as how they moved on and lived their lives.

goo