Survivor

April 1, 2013
An 86-year-old Jewish survivor of ghettos, concentration camps, and the infamous January 1945 Death March, Pivnik graphically describes the casual and systematic brutality he witnessed as a forced guard at Auschwitz—on the ramp where incoming prisoners were processed, he routinely watched as Josef Mengele (“the Angel of Death”), with “casual flicks of his doeskin gloves,” decided whether prisoners were destined for slave labor or death. Pivnik’s grim will to survive impelled him to make numerous moral concessions, but he makes no excuses for his actions: “I became... a human vulture.” When a bracelet he’s stolen is found by a guard, he refuses to fess up, despite the possibility that someone else might take the fall for it: “This was Auschwitz-Birkenau; the rules were different. And you never put your hand up for anything.” Shuttled to and fro as “the Reich to death,” Pivnik was aboard the doomed Cap Arcona, a ship full of prisoners, when it was sunk in the Bay of Lübeck by the British Royal Air Force just days before Germany’s surrender. Amazingly, he swam to shore and lived. The horrors recounted here will be familiar to most readers of Holocaust memoirs, but they are no less shocking for that. 8-page b&w photo insert. Agent: Andrew Lownie, the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency (U.K.).

May 1, 2013
An eloquent, deeply intimate account of a Polish teenager's endurance of successive deathly challenges unimagined in a lifetime. At age 13, Szlamek Pivnik, a tailor's son in the poor but vibrant, predominantly Jewish town of Bedzin, Poland, essentially said goodbye to his idyllic childhood. On September 1, 1939 (the author's birthday), the Germans invaded: Schools closed, the town's main synagogue was burned, the execution squads arrived, and roundups began that gradually restricted the Jews to the ghetto in the nearby quarry. Pivnik's father's skill as a tailor protected the family to some extent, as did the author's job in a furniture factory. Though they tried to hide in an attic, they were forced out by thirst and hunger to join the call for deportations. On the train platform at Auschwitz, separated by the flick of the wrist (Pivnik believes it was Dr. Mengele himself making the selections) into a line left or right (that is, to the death chamber or to work camp), his family disappeared in a heart-rending moment. Pivnik, then 17, was warned that to survive he had to say he was older and join whatever work crew would take him. Pivnik portrays the prisoner so brutalized by daily deprivation and violence that he loses all will to resist, even if given the opportunity, and so unused to using his free will that he became perversely attached to his jailor even when the end was nearing for the Nazis and the march headed west. Masterfully conveys the grim absurdity of the Nazi mentality and the utter dejection of the concentration-camp prisoner.

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April 15, 2013
Certainly there are those who think there are enough memoirs by concentration-camp survivors. The cruelty and executions have been recorded. But each story has a unique slant, its own dark moments, and each makes an impression on the reader about survival under the most dire circumstances. Pivnik's life changed on his thirteenth birthday, when Germany invaded Poland. His older brother went missing, his family (grandmother, mother and father, and younger siblings) were surely killed, but he managed to stave off death at several concentration and work camps. The prose can be workmanlike at times, but his story is absorbing and often riveting. Pivnik, now in his eighties, tells his experiences with the assistance of writer M. J. Trow. Pivnik has excellent recall and, through his accounting, provides another worthy addition to the books on the horrors of Nazi occupation. Highly recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)