The House of Ashes by Oscar Pinkus

An unforgettable book. Regarded as a one of the literary classics of the Holocaust, it is a beautifully written and emotionally powerful first person account of the author’s experience in surviving WW II. I hesitate to write about this book for fear of not doing it justice. Perhaps the immediacy of the experience is tied to the journal he kept throughout the war and used in writing his story. His prose is gentle and direct: silent as a shadow; or speaking of watching the body of his murdered friend, He would float away in pools of green light, then come back hugging the cobblestones. He was not a corpse but the silhouette of a murdered city.

The book moves beyond the myopic story of survival for Pinkus and his family, illustrating the larger social and emotional world of those in his orbit as relationships between survivors and rescuers evolve over the course of years of tension. What begins as a monetary transaction eventually becomes a personal relationship with shared goals against a common enemy - the Germans, and protection against the local AK, the Polish Home Army.

In the Epilogue, Oscar Pinkus enumerates every entity in the world that knew genocide was being perpetrated again the Jews and did nothing to stop it. I was left thinking no one wants to be a person who is aware mass murder is being committed and still does nothing. What can we do today to prevent having that same accusation directed at us?   More Info

Reviewed by Kate Boris-Brown

This book is available to borrow from the Holocaust Center's library. Email Rosa@HolocaustCenterSeattle.org. Books will be mailed for free to members. 

The Sweet Dell: The True Story of One Family's Fight to Save Jews in Nazi-Occupied Holland

by Nicholas John Briejer

Winner of the 2016 Pacific Northwest Writers Association Nancy Pearl Award for Best Book, this is the engaging story of the role the author’s maternal grandparents played in providing refuge to Jews escaping the German roundups in Holland. Dr. Pieter Schoorl and Anne Schoorl lived two hours from Amsterdam with their four young children on the family’s isolated farm in Bennekom. Dr. Schoorl maintained a laboratory in Amsterdam and another lab in a village house close to the farm. These facilities were critical to the success of their rescue work as eventually all three locations were used as safe houses for transporting and hiding escaping Jews.

The story of Briejer’s family provides insight to the wartime logistics of resistance and rescue operations, but also provides a view not often presented of the effects of that involvement on the personal relationships of the rescuers and, in this case, their young children who were active in their parents’ work. Pieter and Anne Schoorl are Honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Briejer, who teaches at Pierce College, is a local author. His book is compelling, well-written, and a good addition to the topic of the resistance and rescue in the Netherlands. More info.

Reviewed by Kate Boris-Brown

This book is available to borrow from the Holocaust Center's library - email Rosa@HolocaustCenterSeattle.org. Books are mailed for free to members.