Michael Skakun

I would call this a secondary memoir -- the author's father survived the Holocaust and recounted it to his son, who wrote this book. The son is a gifted writer and his descriptions are haunting. The father hid "in plain sight" through most of the war, disguised as a Polish/Lithuanian/Muslim Tatar farm worker in Germany, and very nearly joined the Lithuanian SS to complete his disguise. Fortunately liberation came before the SS, who had accepted his application, called him up for duty.

I think this book would be best appreciated by educated people due to its many references to history and classical literature (of both the Western and Jewish kind). I only wish the author had gone into more detail about his father's background before the war and his life afterward. I'm not even sure how old his father was when the Nazis took over his life -- I'm guessing something like 16 or 18, but it never says.… (mehr)

I am really ambivalent about this book. It is an amazing, beyond-belief story of survival against all possible odds. In that sense it is nearly impossible to put down. As a document from the inside of the horrific genocide against the Jews, both from the Germans and the Belarussian, it is chilling. But - the story is told by Skakun's son, who unfortunately has no distance between himself and his father's story. It is written with adolation dripping from the pages, with the good guys being angelic, almost biblical, in every word they utter and every action they perform, while the bad guys are equally one-dimensional. It steals away from the believability of the story, unfortunately, as does the never ending references to Jewish orthodox thought. His description of his father's continuous moral dilemmas, though, is enlightening and wise.… (mehr)