Holocaust - Concentration Camps, Europe - Ethnic & Race Relations, Poland - History, Jewish History - Eastern Europe, Holocaust Biographies, Holocaust - General & Miscellaneous
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Overview
Benjamin Bender, then seventeen, was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp by American forces on April 11, 1945. Forty-five years later, a chance encounter led to his inclusion in an Academy Award-nominated documentary film shot on location there. Glimpses is his compelling story, an odyssey of life, death, and survival in the twentieth century.Editorials
Brian McCombie
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. Though often informative, her story usually lacks the emotional punch of Bender's heartrending fight against fear and degradation. An extremely readable narrative that's both horrifying and uplifting.Book Details
Published
October 1, 1995
Publisher
North Atlantic Books
Pages
224
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781556432095