Kirkus Review
When a prisoner uprising freed hundreds of Jews from the Nazi death camp at Sobibr, Poland, in 1943, Bialowitz heard the leader call out, "If you survive, bear witness to what happened here! Tell the world about this place!" In this harrowing first-person account, the author fulfills the promise he made then.Bialowitz, now one of only a few dozen survivors of Sobibr, where some 250,000 Jews were exterminated in 1942 and 1943, begins his story in Izbica, a small Polish village where Catholic schoolboys taunted him and the other Jewish boys as Christ killers. When the Nazis arrived, Jews were hunted down and killed, sometimes randomly, sometimes methodically. Quick-witted and determined to live, the teenaged Bialowitz had numerous narrow escapes from deathonce he survived a mass graveside shooting by jumping into the pit as the shots were fired and hiding under the dead bodies for hours. In April 1943, however, he was loaded onto a truck by the SS and sent to Sobibr. At the camp, the strong and healthy Bialowitz was selected as a slave laborer, made to unload cattle cars of arriving victims, cut off women's hair before their gassing and search though piles of clothing for valuables. Escape seemed impossible, for the camp was surrounded by heavily armed guards, barbed wire and a mine field. Nevertheless, in October 1943, in the largest and most successful prisoner uprising of the war, some 600 slave laborers revolted. About half managed to break out, the author among them. He hid in the forest, had perilous encounters with armed partisans, was hidden by farmers out of good will or in exchange for money, and eventually found his way home, only to discover that anti-Semitism had not ended with the war. Bialowitz left Poland and spent years in European displaced-persons camps before moving to the United States in 1950. He has made it his mission to keep the memory of the horrors of the Holocaust alive through lectures, testifying at the trials of war criminals and writing.First published in Poland in 2008, this matter-of-fact account is chilling, sobering and memorable.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Most of the Nazi concentration camps were brutal slave-labor facilities, in which the deaths resulted from disease, malnutrition, and the sheer brutality of daily life. Sobibor, on the other hand, was designed from inception as an extermination camp. Located within a forested area in Poland, Sobibor had a full array of sophisticated equipment for mass murder, and an estimated 250,000 Jews were killed there in 1942 and 1943. In October 1943, camp inmates revolted, killing guards and staging a mass escape. Few of them survived. Philip Bialowitz, now a retired jeweler living in New York, was one of them. His story, told with the aid of his son Joseph, is riveting, horrifying, and inspiring. Philip's life in a tiny Polish town before the Nazi invasion was tolerable but tense due to touchy relations between the Jewish and gentile communities. Life in Sobibor is vividly described as hell on earth, and the violent revolt provides an almost joyful emotional release as Jews strike back at their tormentors. This is a superb account of survival and redemption as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Bialowitz survived the Holocaust thanks to determination, intelligence, the kindness of Polish gentiles, and a great amount of luck. While his account here spans his life from young adulthood in pre-World War II Poland to his postwar life in the United States, the focus, and the most interesting part of his memoir, is his part in one of the most dramatic moments of the Nazi era. Imprisoned in Sobibor, a death camp in Poland, Bialowitz participated in the largest successful prisoner revolt of the Holocaust. That he survived both the revolt and the war as a whole, along with several siblings, makes his story a rare one. Verdict Many Holocaust memoirs suffer from the inclusion of historical-contextual material that is post facto additions to historical memory. Bialowitz, with his son and coauthor, worked assiduously to ensure that his story was told from a perspective contemporary to his experiences then and not based on hindsight. Overall, he succeeds, making this a worthy addition to the corpus of Holocaust memoirs.-Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
