By
– January 10, 2012
The authors combed Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation recordings and other archives and collected more than fifty narrow escapes, reunions, love stories, and near miraculous turns of fate that explain how some people survived the Shoah. One of the most memorable, “My Betrayer, My Savior,” is about a murdered mother visiting her son in his dreams, telling him how to escape, and then visiting his jailer, who had turned him in and is now waiting to help him in the forest. There is also a new story, “Righteous Among the Nations,” about the Sugiharas’ visit to a Jewish family during Hanukkah. (He was the Japanese Consul who supplied visas to the Jews of Lithuania.)
“Good Morning Herr Mueller” shows the spark of humanity that sometimes still flickers.
Not all the stories are of the same caliber, but all are points of light in a maelstrom of darkness. The telling is straightforward, but tales like these don’t need inventive writing.
Marcia W. Posner, Ph.D., of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, is the library and program director. An author and playwright herself, she loves reviewing for JBW and reading all the other reviews and articles in this marvelous periodical.
