An Unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust - Softcover

Henry A. Oertelt; Stephanie Oertelt Samuels

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822529521 ISBN 13: 9780822529521

Publisher: Lerner Pub Group, 2000

Synopsis

A Holocaust survivor chronicles the chain of events that kept him alive, providing first-hand accounts of Hitler's rise to power, Kristallnacht, and confinement in various concentration camps.

About this title

From School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up-The authors link together a chain of events or facts that saved Oertelt's life during the Holocaust. While in his early `20s, he and his family were sent to a succession of Nazi concentration camps. He recounts the horror of this time, the struggle to survive, and the efforts to help one another. He argues that 18 things kept him alive, 18 being the numeric value for the Hebrew word for "life." Among these links are the more commonplace, such as his good health before being incarcerated; his youth; and his profession of trained furniture maker, which occasionally helped him to secure less punishing work assignments. Others, however, are more remarkable, like the encounter with a foreman at a work site where Oertelt was working before being sent to the camps. This man, an assumed Nazi supporter, alerted the Jews on his crew to leave the site one day when the Nazis arrived, thereby giving them the chance to escape capture, if only for a little while. Written with a good deal of emotion, the book is very affecting. A solid choice for Holocaust-memoir collections.-Carol Faz-ioli, formerly at The Brearley School, New York City

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Gr. 9^-up. Oertelt, who lived with his older brother and widowed mother in Berlin, had just marked his twelfth birthday when Hitler came to power in January 1933. He begins with a firsthand account of Kristallnacht (November 9^-10, 1938), when the Nazis destroyed Jewish property and synagogues across Germany and Austria, and he recounts the many anti-Jewish directives that followed. Oertelt divides the book into 18 "links" in the chain of events that kept him alive. They include a Nazi foreman who warned him of an impending Gestapo roundup of Jews, giving him time to flee; a 15-month confinement in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where the chance of survival was somewhat better than at Auschwitz; and the fact that he remained in relatively good health and received medical treatment from an SS general-doctor when he did become ill. The two brothers survived, but their mother and most of their relatives were murdered. This is an extraordinary memoir of one brave individual's travail during the Holocaust. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Lerner Pub Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0822529521
• ISBN 13: 9780822529521
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160