On the Run in Nazi Berlin
A Memoir
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
BERLIN, 1942. The Gestapo arrest eighteen-year-old Bert Lewyn and his parents, sending the latter to their deaths and Bert to work in a factory making guns for the Nazi war effort. Miraculously tipped off the morning the Gestapo round up all the Jews who work in the factories, Bert goes underground. He finds shelter sometimes with compassionate civilians, sometimes with people who find his skills useful and sometimes in the cellars of bombed-out buildings. Without proper identity papers, he survives as a hunted Jew in the flames and terror of Nazi Berlin in part by successfully mimicking non-Jews, even masquerading as an SS officer. But the Gestapo are hot on his trail...
Before World War II, 160,000 Jews lived in Berlin. By 1945, only 3,000 remained alive. Bert was one of the few, and his thrilling memoir—from witnessing the famous 1933 book burning to the aftermath of the war in a displaced persons camp—offers an unparalleled depiction of the life of a runaway Jew caught in the heart of the Nazi empire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This remembrance of a teen's struggle to survive the Holocaust won't provide readers familiar with similar memoirs new insights. In 1942, the author and his parents were taken from their Berlin apartment by the Nazis and separated. Lewyn's experience as an apprentice in machine building and metalworking spared him for a time, as he was put to work in a munitions factory. A chance encounter with a non-Jewish coworker alerted him to the Germans' decision to send the factory's Jewish workers to a death camp, allowing Lewyn to escape the roundup. He spent the remainder of WWII dodging capture, aided by the occasional selfless stranger, his own resourcefulness, and lucky breaks one of which was that he was saved from being shot by liberating Russian forces when one of them, who happened also to be Jewish, believed Lewyn wasn't a Nazi because he had read a textbook that Lewyn's Russian uncle had written. The book could be better organized; Saltzman Lewyn, the author's daughter-in-law, bafflingly places two sections of Lewyn's reminiscences in appendices, rather than chronologically within the main text. Despite this, this memoir will be informative for those who have not viewed the Nazi extermination of European Jewry from an individual's perspective.
