From Publishers Weekly
In 1941, Wilhelm Bachner, a Polish Jewish engineer, escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, posing as a gentile, landed a job as supervisor with a German architectural firm. Armed with a pass that enabled him to enter and leave the ghetto as an Aryan, he rescued 50 Polish Jews, supplying them with false identity papers and work permits. He assigned some to his firm's work crews; others were given office jobs; still others he placed in hiding. His remarkable story unfolds with the rich texture of a novel in this meticulously researched chronicle. Bachner, who survived harrowing encounters with Nazi SS interrogators, helped his wife and his father escape the Warsaw ghetto, but his mother, brother and sister were swallowed up in the Nazi death machine. Oliner, project director of Humboldt State University's Altruistic Personality and Pro-Social Behavior Institute in California, and Lee, a Humboldt political scientist, interviewed Bachner and his wife in 1983; the couple had emigrated to California in 1951 (they both died in 1991). Drawing on interviews with relatives, the people rescued and archival research, the authors add a stirring chapter to documented Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Bachner, a Polish Jew, was trapped in Warsaw when the Germans overran the country in September 1939. He, his wife, and his parents moved into the Warsaw Ghetto. Speaking fluent German and possessing an engineering degree from a German university, he posed as an Aryan and eventually was able to get a job heading a crew of construction workers. He hired dozens of Polish Jews and supplied them with false identity papers, thus saving them from death. The authors interviewed Bachner in 1983 (he died in 1991) and later interviewed the Jews Bachner saved as well as their family members. They researched archival material on the German railroad that employed Bachner, as well as the rail-based construction units where Bachner spent the last year and a half of the war. They tell the story of Bachner against the background of the historical events that surrounded it, their book a part of a growing body of evidence that refutes the belief that Jews went to their deaths without resistance. George Cohen
