Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp

"In 1972 the Hamburg State Court acquitted Walther Becker of war crimes committed against Jews. Thirty years before, Becker, the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, had been responsible for liquidating the nearby Jewish ghetto, sending nearly 4,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka and 1,600 to slave labor in the local munitions factories. The shocking acquittal, delivered despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of almost sixty survivors, drives Christopher R. Browning's inquiry." "Employing the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of these slave-labor camps, Browning's history draws together the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities, and the neighboring Poles. For the Jews the camps, brutal and deadly as conditions were, represented their best chance for survival. There they lived under corrupt camp regimes and produced for the German war effort even as they sacrificed to protect children, spouses, parents, or neighbors." For the Germans the camps, critical to munitions production, were anomalies in the systematic killing of Jews. Himmler's "harvest-festival" massacre of November 1943, when 42,000 Jewish workers in Poland's eastern camps were killed in two days, largely spared the western camps. But in a selection days later, some 160 Starachowice prisoners were taken to the forest, shot, and buried in a mass grave. Arbitrary killing was an ever-present threat even under the most pragmatic camp regime. For the Poles the factories provided a meager employment. Some actively aided Jewish neighbors in the camps. Others made this region a stronghold for anti-Semitic and extremist partisan forces, with the highest incidenceof postwar killing of Jews in Poland.

"An important, revealing story, exceptionally well told."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

The literature of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is so vast as to defy comprehension, yet there remain aspects of the subject that are insufficiently covered or not covered at all. Christopher Browning's fine, harrowing Remembering Survival points us in yet another little-charted direction. It is the history of a Nazi slave-labor camp at Starachowice, in central Poland, where between 1942 and 1944 thousands of Jews were forced to work…to produce munitions for the Nazi war machine…Browning is keenly sensitive to the unreliability of memory, especially memory of distant events, so as he stitches together the story of Starachowice he is especially careful to distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence. There can be no doubt, however, of the essential truth of this story, a small one when viewed against everything else that happened in that dreadful time, but an important and revealing one, exceptionally well told in Remembering Survival.

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and the author of Ordinary Men, Remembering Survival and other works of Holocaust history. He lives in Chapel Hill.