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Stronger than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941 1945: An Eyewitness Account, by Mendel Balberyszski
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This eyewitness account details the destructionc of Vilna Jewry at the hands of the Nazis. Its chronicle of life in the two Vilna ghettos is the only historical document describing life in the small ghetto from its formation until its liquidation. The book is a historical document of primary importance. It is also an expression of the innermost thoughts and feelings of a single individual whose will to survive and to bring this story to the judgment of future generations was stronger than iron.
- Sales Rank: #1252092 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Gefen Publishing House
- Published on: 2010-07-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.72" h x 1.20" w x 7.12" l, 1.82 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 372 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
About the Author
Mendel Balberyszski, born in Vilna, completed pharmaceutical studies at the Vilna University and the Warsaw University. After surviving the Vilna ghettos and the Estonian concentration camps, he was reunited with his family and they emigrated to Australia, where his Balberyszski Jewish Bookstore became a communal landmark. Balberyszski died in Melbourne, Australia, on November 19, 1966.
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
One Family's Trials and Tribulations in the Vilna Ghetto during WWII
By Barbara Anne Atkins
There are really no words to describe this powerful memoir but i will try. This amazing life story is told by Mendel Balberyszski, a pharmacist, a Jew, and a devoted husband and father. He and his family had the misfortune of suffering the most severe brutalities at the hands of both the Lithuanians and the Germans during WWII. His book is a testament to the stronger than iron will of the Jewish population of Vilna, Poland who tried at every turn to survive and negate the German intention of wiping out the entire Jewish population. He and his wife and son and daughter are fine examples of Jews who survived during WWII against great odds.
Balberyszski describes for us in great detail his struggle to protect his family during the tragic years the Germans occupied Vilna, Poland from June, 1941 to September, 1944. This is a memoir that will grasp your soul and shake your sensibilities to the core. This is a hard book to read but it is also a difficult book to put down. Why do I say this? Because the reader can't help but find joy in all the small triumphs Balberyszski manages to achieve during these terrible times and yet it is so difficult to learn about the daily misery and abuse that he, his family and all the other Jews experience in the Vilna ghetto. This is a stunning story of a man who endures crisis after crisis and never gives up.
The authorl describes the pathos of the times best when he and his family are sent to the first camp, "All our notions about evil, suffering, brutatlity, human hate, pain and sadism, all our understandings about the greatest and most shocking fate that can befall humanity were to pale and count for nothing compared to what we were going to go through in the next three years." Hundreds of Jews disappear daily, thousands are shot and many starve to death. The reader learns about the daily life in the ghetto, how Jews create a society within the ghetto to support each other and make life as normal as possible. Balberyszski explains how the Judenrat evolved in the ghetto and their failure to protect their fellow Jews. He describes the role of the Jewish police and the resentment of those living in the ghetto towards these men who many times made decisions that cost fellow Jews their lives. The reader learns that the ghetto police became the instrument of the Gestapo.
I would highly recommend this book as a must read for any adult since it is important that all of us recognize and acknowledge the suffering of Jewish people at the hands of the German nation and honor the memory of those that perished during the Holocaust. But most importantly, this book makes us realize that genocide of any kind anywhere on this planet is unacceptable. Take the time to read this historical memoir and you will quickly realize that each man's actions have consequences that impact others and you will recognize how important it is to think before you act. "Stronger than Iron" is a book that was first written in Yiddish, then translated into Engiish and should be made available in many languages so people around the globe can gain a better understanding of the emotional and physical devastation of war upon those caught in its web.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Lithuanian Holocaust
By Fred Bacon
In June of 1941, the German Wehrmacht launched itself into the Soviet Union and its occupied territories (western Poland, the Baltic states, etc.) on a crusade to conquer Lebensraum for the German people. Following close behind the Wehrmacht came the Einsatzgruppen, special task forces sent to clear the newly conquered territories of their jewish residents, for the western regions of the Soviet Union formed the old Jewish Pale of Settlement of the Russian empire. It was in these territories that Hitler's SS first embarked upon the systematic destruction of the Jewish population, and one of the most notorious killing fields was at Ponary, a suburb of Vilnius, Lithuania.
Mendel Balberyszski, a pharmacist who was active in the jewish community of Vilnius, and his family survived first the Jewish ghetto and then the Estonian concentration camps to document the fate of the Lithuanian Jews during the war. Written in the 1950s, Balberyszski first published Stronger than Iron in Yiddish during the 1960s. Now his son, Theodore, also a survivor, has translated his father's history into English. It's a shame that this book was not available in English before now, for what we have is a stark, grim, but facinating, first person account of the daily life and inexorable destruction of the Jewish community of Lithuania.
Balberyszski was prescient enough to realize that what was happening needed to be recorded for posterity, and lucky enough to survive until liberated by the Red Army in 1945. Although his original notes did not survive the war, his prodigious memory, coupled with extensive research in the archives after the war, has produced a detailed, eyewitness testimony of how the Einsatzgruppen slowly dehumanized and destroyed the Jews.
Balberyszski does not concern himself with philosophical musing on his own fate or the nature of good and evil. This is a cold, sober recording of events as they happened, although an understandable note of bitterness permeates the book. That bitterness is most evident when it is aimed at Jacob Gens, head of the Jewish police in the larger of the two ghettos of Vilnius.
Gens, to Balberyszski's dismay, collaborated with the Germans to deliver a stream of Jewish victims for the pits of Ponary. In Gens' view, it is argued, using the Jewish police force to do the dirty work of rounding up victims for the Germans helped to protect the remaining ghetto residents. Clearly, the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators would have been more vicious than the police if allowed to collect the Jews on their own. But even this is an oversimplification.
It is obvious that Gens was frequently decieved by the Germans, who played him like a fish on a line. At first, the fate of the Jews being delivered to the Germans was unknown. Rumors of Ponary existed, some originating from the warnings of sympathetic Lithuanians, but many coming from the taunting of the Germans and their collaborators. The rumors were confirmed beyond any doubt when a woman, wounded, buried, and left for dead, crawls from her shallow grave and returns to the ghetto. Yet, still, Gens continued to deliver victims to the Gestapo long after the ultimate fate of his offerings were beyond doubt. Gens himself went to his death at the hands of the Germans, so we'll never know what compelled him to make his Abrahamic sacrifices.
Against all odds, Mendel Balberyszski managed to keep his entire family alive through the war. Hard work for the Germans, doggedness, cleverness, bribery and sheer blind luck all play a role in their survival. Nail-biting tension and hair-breadth escapes pile one atop another over the course of four years. The relentless pressure and paranoia are palpably portrayed. The simple, journalistic style of the narrative heightens the ratcheting terror as the ghetto empties and the remaining residents search for safety like cornered animals.
Stronger than Iron is an unforgettable account of one man's fight to keep his wife and children alive. While historical and literary accounts of the Shoah are numerous, the immediacy of this memoir makes it an important work. More than just the personal struggles of one man and his family, Balberyszski portrays the intricacies of ghetto life and its administration. As an historical record, it is invalvuable. As a personal memoir, it is a powerful evocation of a tragic time.
In translating his father's book, Theodore Balberyszski, has chosen to emphasize the personal story of his family and their struggles during the German occupation of Lithuania. The original Yiddish version of the book was longer and contained extensive archival documentation, making it more of an historical record than a personal memoir. Besides the removal of documentary material, the younger Balberyszski has removed more than a year and a half of from the start of his father's narrative.
The book originally began with the September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland, when the Balberyszskis were living in Lvov. Sadly, this causes us to lose this record of life under the Soviet occupation. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave Stalin carte blanche to occupy eastern Poland and the Baltic states. While the Russians and Germans were dividing Poland, Mendel Balberyszski managed to move his family from Lvov to his home town of Vilnius. Dropping this part of the narrative almost certainly focuses the story, making for a more powerful book. But for someone interested in the history of the Soviet side of the war, it is a terrible loss. One can only hope that we will eventually get a full translation of the original work into English.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A Hero
By Asher Gabbay
Many people are called heroes, and for various reasons. Usually we think of a hero as someone who has performed some extraordinary thing, some feat that common people cannot perform. Mendel Balberyszski simply lived his life, as best as he could under the circumstances, and yet he was a hero.
"Stronger than Iron" tells the story of the destruction of the Jewish population of Vilna (Vilnius), capital of modern-day Lithuania, by the Nazi occupiers during World War Two. It is an eyewitness account of the events that occurred to Balberyszski and his family between 22 June, 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, until the liberation in 1945 of the Estonian concentration camp to which the few surviving souls from Vilna were deported to.
Stronger than Iron Balberyszski's account is important both from a historical perspective and from a personal one. His detailed account of the setting up of the German administration, the workings of the Judenrat and the conditions of lives of the Jews in the ghettos, provide a historical document of great importance. But more importantly, in my opinion, are the personal feelings that Balberyszski shares with his readers as he tells of life in the two Vilna ghettos and then in the concentration camp. Much has been said about the impossibility for our generation to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust, but I felt that Balberyszski's account succeeded in conveying some of the horrors that his generation had to witness.
What struck me most about Balberyszski's account is the prosaic nature, almost banal in its mundaneness, of how he and others have cheated death time and again. He describes the raids of the Nazis and their barbaric Lithuanian collaborators in the ghettos, raids that ended only when a pre-determined number of Jews were rounded up to be taken to their deaths - hundreds and even thousands at a time. He describes the hiding places that Jews found or built in order to survive these raids, sometimes lasting several days. And yet he and other survived by simply being in the right place at the right time, by turning a corner seconds before the killers arrived, or by having the right amount of money or an expensive watch or even a pair of gloves to buy them another day of life.
And throughout this ordeal Jews found ways to help other Jews. Balberyszski recounts simple stories of how people gave him and his family shelter or clothes or some food, even though they were risking their own lives by doing so. He does not shy away from telling us how some Jews were unable to rise above their immediate personal needs, but it is apparent this was the exception rather than the rule.
This is the reason Balberyszski and his fellow Jews are heroes. In the darkest period in the history of humanity, when the Nazis and their collaborators sought to dehumanize an entire people, most Jews stood firm and risked their lives to help others. This book is testimony to such heroes.
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