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after another, and then in an orphanage - yet another three-room house
set up for children picked up from the alleys, the ruined houses, the
barns, and among the corpses. Almost inexplicably, she survived despite
bouts of typhoid and malaria, incredible hunger and filth, biting bedbugs
and other vermin. And she miraculously eluded the "infamous German
commander, Major von Breitag, who on his customary strolls [through
the town ofBershad] enjoyed shooting dogs and Jews" - by hiding under
,
her bed inside the orphanage.
Ruth's Journey
inadvertently documents that anti-Semitism was as en-
\
demic to Romanians as to Germans, and to Poles and Russians, though
among them she encountered a few humane persons as well. But only
half of her memoir deals with her escape. The second part focuses on life
after her rescue, on her harrowing flight from Romania on a freighter
that was shipwrecked en route to Palestine, on her resilience in a British
detention camp on the island of Cyprus, and eventually on helping build
a Kibbutz in the hills above Jerusalem. Now, she recounts how personal
ambitions, and difficulties in forming intimate relations, began to loom
larger: she ended up becoming a nurse, married a Romanian Jew with
whom she moved to Colombia, and after whose death, in 1988, she first
confronted the sadness at having lost her parents, her brother, and the rest
of her enormous family. She talks of the memories and feelings that had
been bottled up all these years, and of searching for the remaining rela-
tives, in Israel and Vienna. Ruth ends up telling us that she induced
herself to recall this past in order to make sure that these monstrous
crimes will never be forgotten - thereby obeying the biblical command,
Zakhor,
to remember.
Eva Fogelman wrote
Conscience and Courage
in order to pay tribute to
those who risked their lives to save her father, Simcha Fagelman, and
thousands of other Jews. Her father had been a soldier, and after the Rus–
sian invasion of his Byelorussion town near Vilna, had become a baker.
When the Germans arrived, they began rounding up Jews. His daughter
briefly tells of the dangerous circumstances he survived, and that he barely
got away - thanks to a Russian baker and a score of farmers who hid him,
and gave him some food. He met her mother after the war, in the dis–
placed person's camp where their daughter was born. The family first
moved to Israel and then to the United States.
In the 1970s, after Fogelman became aware that children of survivors
suffered from an unrecognized and psychologically damaging sense of
isolation, she formed a support group for them. All of their parents, in
one way or another, had been saved by "ordinary individuals" who en-
