This book is a socio-autobiography of a young man, born in a Jewish town at the foot-hills of the Carpathian Mountains in 1925 to a devout Jewish family, and his journey through the Holocaust toward academia in the United States. This new edition also follows his story into retirement. This book is the revelation and personal evolution of a boy born and steeped in orthodoxy who, while retaining the essence of the values into which he inducted, sought at the same time to re-interpret his original values and ideals. He takes this orthodox-particularism and seeks to reconstruct it to become a universalist view of mankind. This book is also a description of his effort to reconstruct his life which had been destroyed by Hitler’s effort to make the world “Jew free.” In the camps, he lost most of his family upon which the foundation of his early life was built. After the war, finding himself alone, he had to revise his plans for the future and was forced to find his way alone, in another world and another way of life. He seeks to overcome obstacles and rebuild his life, while also finding a niche for himself in a new, post-Holocaust world. Eugen Schoenfeld, shares with his readers the hardships he endured both in the camps and after liberation; of hunger and loneliness and separation from his father living behind the Iron Curtain. He invites his readers to share the various choices he had to make, to understand the reasons for his decisions, in the process of re-constructing his life. He explores the paths he had to follow in order to achieve his goal of understanding, finding the answers to the question he asked his father on the first day in Aushwitz-Birkenau: “How is possible that now, in the midst of the twentieth century, after all the great achievements in philosophy, psychology, and theology, man is still inhumane?” This book is his search for a way through which human beings can reconstruct themselves, can cease living merely as human beings and evolving into humane beings.
Eugen Schoenfeld was born in 1925 in Mukacevo, set at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. The city was part of Czechoslovakia until 1938, at which time it became part of Hungary, and is now part of the Ukraine. He was raised in the deeply rooted traditions of the Jewish faith, amid the large Jewish-Chassidic population in the city. At the same time, he attended the Hebrew Gymnasium where he was introduced to Jewish history and its continuation in Zionism. The Jewish community of Mukacevo was destroyed by Hitler's "Final Solution" that also killed his family.
Having survived the internment in four concentration camps, he first attempted to continue his education in Prague, but fled the city before the Communist government took power. For two years, he worked for UNRRA in Germany, helping thousands of Displaced Persons find new homes all over the world. With a scholarship in hand, he came to the United States to rebuild his life and complete his education with a Ph.D. in Sociology from Southern Illinois University. After a successful academic career he became chairman of the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University, where he developed the department's Ph.D. program. Dr. Schoenfeld still resides in Atlanta.
