If You Save One Life

by Eva Brown, Thomas Fields-Meyer

Point a finger, said the American soldier, at the one who made you look like a skeleton.

That sentence marks the end of a nightmare and a moment of moral clarity for Eva Brown, who survived Auschwitz and lost sixty members of her extended family in the Holocaust.

Born into a close and loving Jewish home, Brown saw her idyllic childhood end at age 16, when Nazi troops invaded the small Hungarian town where her father was a rabbi. In If You Save One Life, Brown vividly describes how she endured through faith, determination, and her sheer will to survive. Her story will make you cry and sing.

Genres: Nonfiction

152 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Doris Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated reading her first-hand account of how she survived genocide. Many of her immediate family were murdered, only her, her father, two sisters and a brother survived. Her mother and four other siblings – sixty members of her family perished. The book is only 150 pages, but it must be impossibly difficult to re-live this kind of horror in order to write a book about it. I especially liked the photographs in the middle of the book.

I think that she was more optimistic and much more forgiving than I would have been. I also think that her optimism and forgiveness helped her to re-build her life as a survivor better than I would have re-built mine had I been her. She said that she made it a point to always smile during her imprisonment and smiling seems to have kept her alive. 40 years later, another survivor at the Los Angeles German consulate recognized her from her smile. They had never met, but the other woman said "I always wondered how you could always smile in Auschwitz!"

I would have liked to read more details of the horror and depravity of this evil. She told how two catholic nuns, Sister Paula and Sister Anne had collected charity and shared tea at her family's house before the occupation. When the Nazis occupied her town, she and her mother were crossing a bridge and these two nuns were coming the other way. The nuns "both glared at us, and, without warning, they spit in our faces – one on Mother, one on me. I was stunned..."

It was a living nightmare where human dignity had vanished. Since I didn't live through it, I could survive reading about it but she had to experience it. She kept these painful details to a minimum, such as "...corpses on wheelbarrows...I tried to dismiss it..." which probably helped her to stay sane. She saw that people with cheer, strength and vitality had a chance at survival while the weak, sick, hunched-over and sad people were simply just taken out of line and shot.

She remained silent for fifty years as silence was a protection against the past and an engine into the future. She decided to forgive and to let it go and to move on. She says that she learned the importance of the psychological art of denial and of distance. She seems to have led an emotionally balanced and moderate life afterward.

At the end of the book on page 147, she writes "An Address to Students" which is one of the many speeches she has given. I have copied this speech and keep it with a small group of papers which I read over again from time to time.

Thank you to Eva Brown, for this memoir of unbelievable but true horrors. She is a woman of valor and she is to be admired.

[Leslie Mojica]

This book was amazing! Eva went threw so much and survived and ended up having a wonderful family , she was a really strong woman <3 She went threw all that with the Nazis and the other Jews but at the end she made it (-: sadly 4 out of 9 of her family members died , Eva kept quiet for a couple years with her husband After everything happened and she was settled with her family. But she wrote and book and gave speeches. She opened up and I can assure you that many tears were poured out when she wrote this book . R.I.P Eva Brown <3

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent personal account by a holocaust survivor.

[Joe]

cool

[Casey]

own