Glimpses: Through Holocaust and Liberation

by Benjamin Bender

Holocaust survivor Bender was 11 years old when the German army invaded his native Poland. He lived in Czestochowa, a backward town steeped in medieval ideas and anti-Semitic attitudes--and thoroughly unprepared for the mechanized terror of the Nazis. When the SS arrived, Bender, his family, and the town's other Jews were soon segregated into a ghetto. Later, Bender and his brother were spared from the death camps because they could provide useful labor for Hitler's war machine. Forced to leave their parents behind, they moved from factory to factory, only to end up at Buchenwald.

Interspersed throughout are chapters about Bender's future wife, Sara, her struggle against Nazi occupation, and how she and Bender later met in an Israeli kibbutz. Glimpses is an extremely readable narrative that's both horrifying and uplifting.

Genres: History

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1995

Reviews

[Wendy]

The title of the book is accurate: Glimpses is not an account of daily life of the author during the Holocaust, but spurts of memory. Some of it, particularly the third-person narrated recreations of the deaths of several of Bender's family, is extremely moving. But the dialogue is very stilted, and often the characters/people in the novel use direct address in sentence after sentence. The writing could use a serious dose of editing.
I was also pretty bored by the author's exploits in Palestine/Israel.
I guess in the end most of the book lacks a certain depth, something that I've been able to find in other Holocaust memoirs like Rena's Promise.