Michael Bornstein, & Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, Survivors Club : the true story of a very young prisoner of Auschwitz, Text Publishing, April 2017, 552 pp., $16.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781925498028,
On Michael Bornsten’s arm is the tattoo B-1148 forever a reminder of his time in the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, but also a testament to one of the camp’s youngest survivors.
By the time Bornstein was born in 1940, his hometown Zarki Poland was already under German control. Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to school, Jews could not go on buses and most of the Jewish businesses were shut down or taken over by the Nazis. Forced to wear white armbands with a blue six-point Star of David, and under strict curfew, this was the beginning of a reign of terror that would shape Bornstein’s early life.
Stripped of their homes, their livelihood and their dignity many of the Jews of Zarki were brutalized, tortured and ultimately murdered in concentration camps in German occupied Poland and Germany. But despite the terror of these years Bornstein and his daughter Debbie deftly weave into the fabric of their story another tale, one of survival and endurance of the human spirit through the love and generosity of family, friends and strangers, along with more than a bit of luck.
Through recollections, interviews with survivors and research, Michael and Debbie, a producer for NBC and MSNBC News, have recreated a powerful first person narrative for young adult readers: an important, confronting, absorbing and well-written story.
Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Mem Capp
1 Comment
There were no concentration camps in “Poland”. There were camps in “German occupied Poland”.
The terms “Poland”, “Germany” and “German occupied Poland” are not interchangeable. They are significantly different geo-political entities.
As the son of a member of the Polish underground whose unit “Zoska” was acknowledged
by Yad Vashem for saving 350 Jews during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising I would like to point
out that calling any German concentration camp in German occupied Poland “POLISH”, or referring to a German concentration camp in occupied Poland as “in Poland”, “of Poland,” or “Poland’s,” is insensitive to the families of the millions of ethnic Poles who were killed, forced into slave labor, tortured, maimed, terrorized and starved during the brutal and inhuman occupation of Poland by Germany in the name of “Deuthschland, Deutschland Uber Alles” and “Lebensraum” for Germans. It is insensitive to a nation that rejected repeated overtures by Hitler to join the German Nazis in an alliance against the Soviets and did much to defy German Nazism, at extreme cost, from the beginning of WW II until the end. The camps were “German” and they were in German occupied Poland.
Please change the text.
FYI: The proper reference to the GERMAN camps would be:
– Museum/Memorial of the GERMAN camp in PRESENT DAY Poland
– Museum/Memorial of the GERMAN NAZI camp in PRESENT DAY Poland
– GERMAN camp in occupied Poland
– GERMAN Nazi camp in occupied Poland
– GERMAN camp in Nazi occupied Poland
– Nazi camp in GERMAN occupied Poland
– GERMAN Nazi camp in German occupied Poland
Thank You
Stefan Komar