Overview
The breathtakign tale of the "Jewish Oskar Schindler," Wilhelm Bachner, who saved more than 50 jews and Gentiles from almost certain death at the hands of Nazis. Bachner, born in an Austran section of Poland, grew up speakng flawless German. He became an engineer, moved to Warsaw not long before the German invasion, and was confined with other Jews in the Nazi-created ghetto. Bachner escaped from the ghetto and was able to get a job with a German engineering firm. He then able to hire Polish Jews and supply them with fake identity papers. This was a dangerous, nerve-wracking game.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In 1941, Wilhelm Bachner, a Polish Jewish engineer, escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, posing as a gentile, landed a job as supervisor with a German architectural firm. Armed with a pass that enabled him to enter and leave the ghetto as an Aryan, he rescued 50 Polish Jews, supplying them with false identity papers and work permits. He assigned some to his firm's work crews; others were given office jobs; still others he placed in hiding. His remarkable story unfolds with the rich texture of a novel in this meticulously researched chronicle. Bachner, who survived harrowing encounters with Nazi SS interrogators, helped his wife and his father escape the Warsaw ghetto, but his mother, brother and sister were swallowed up in the Nazi death machine. Oliner, project director of Humboldt State University's Altruistic Personality and Pro-Social Behavior Institute in California, and Lee, a Humboldt political scientist, interviewed Bachner and his wife in 1983; the couple had emigrated to California in 1951 (they both died in 1991). Drawing on interviews with relatives, the people rescued and archival research, the authors add a stirring chapter to documented Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. Photos. (Dec.)Booknews
Recounts the story of a Polish Jew who, by posing as a Gentile and through working as an architect for the German railroad, managed to obtain the release of more than 50 family and friends, both Jews and Gentiles, at risk of being annihilated himself. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Kirkus Reviews
The dramatic, if overly dramatized, account of a "Jewish Oskar Schindler" who rescued many Jews during the Holocaust.Holocaust survivor and scholar Oliner (The Altruistic Personality, 1988) and political scientist Lee (both at Humboldt State University) have turned their Holocaust research and survivor interviews into a fairly engaging narrative. The book's protagonist is Wilhelm Bachner, a German-educated Polish Jew who successfully masquerades as a gentile Pole. Using his position as an engineer for a firm that does vital repair work in Nazi factories, Bachner is able to hire, hide, and save over 50 Jews during the war. A good fraction of those rescued are Bachner's own family, so that his wife is passed off as his mistress and his father is recast as the company cook. All of Bachner's machinations fail to save his younger brother, Bruno, who perishes in a death camp, and the plot is constantly thickened by SS bloodhounds looking for fleeing Jews. Bachner repeatedly bluffs and outwits the Germans. On one occasion, following a Bachner tirade, the cowed SS even apologizes for disrupting his work. The plot is a page-turner, but Oliner and Lee should have hired a scriptwriter to upgrade the re-created dialogue. Holocaust history, including the facts and figures, is unobtrusively inserted into the narrative, as when the firm encounters work crews from forced labor camps or trainloads of Jews headed east for extermination. There is also a bit of comic relief provided, such as when one of the disguised Jews becomes a "prisoner of love to a rotund Ukrainian" woman. A happy ending includes Bachner's incredulous supervisor being told, as liberation nears, just how many of his workers were Jews.
The book is a noteworthy addition to the literature on Holocaust rescuers, despite its mediocre adoption of fictional techniques to render historical events.