His father was a Polish soldier when Hitler invaded Poland during the second world war and actively participated in the underground Polish resistance when Poland was carved into two and occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He was then barely 17 years old. But the Gestapo found out about his father’s activities and came knocking at their house one night. He and his father managed to flee, separately, but his mother and brother were arrested and placed in a concentration camp.
Not for long, however, he and his father were also caught, cruelly tortured, and they both landed in Auschwitz where his father later perished after horribly suffering. After about a year, he was transferred to another death camp, Buchenwald, and subsequently to some Nazi labor camps. This run was for several years, from 1941 to 1945, where he was under constant threat of death DAILY: death from violence, death from ill luck, death from injuries, death from illnesses and epidemics, death from hunger, death from exhaustion, death by suicide (a constant temptation), senseless death and, later, even death from friendly fire. He had witnessed countless such horrific deaths and suffering.
It doesn’t appear that he was even a Jew. Just someone born at the wrong time, and at the wrong place.
The admirable thing about this memoir is the matter-of-fact narration of what the author had seen, heard and experienced during those sad times. He draws you into his world by presenting it to you without embellishments. It is as if he’s saying: “Here, come and see this brutal world when I was a young man and decide for yourself how you like to feel about it.”
How did he survive? He does not know. He does not even think there is a WHY about his survival. He takes no credit for himself nor does he suggests any supernatural intervention. For he had seen, daily, that death is something that has no purpose, no meaning and utterly senseless. Like life under such conditions. Death comes, whimsically, to anyone. He was constantly aware that it could claim him anytime, that he would be helpless against it, and he could not avoid it even if he resists the thought with all his might. Of course he was then young, but:
“it is difficult to say whether only youth made it easier to survive. Many young people died of exhaustion, were murdered or killed—no one has as yet put a figure on how many young people survived in proportion to the old. It seems that, above all, survival depended on luck. That’s right: inexplicable fate which brought death to some and eventual freedom to others.” (p.9)
Life is a lottery.