Walking with the Damned : the Shocking Murder of the Man Who Freed 30, 000 Prisoners from the Nazis / Ted Schwarz

Schwarz relates the story of the disparate characters and forces that converged around Count Folke Bernadotte, who engineered the rescue of nearly 30,000 concentration camp prisoners only to be later assassinated by Zionist extremists during his attempts to negotiate a peace between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem in 1948. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Tedious account of riveting events surrounding Count Folke Bernadotte's release of prisoners from German concentration camps and his subsequent assassination, by Schwarz (co-author, The Peter Lawford Story, 1988, etc.). This is a story of unlikely allies--the idealistic Boy Scout leader Count Folke Bernadotte and the sinister SS leader Heinrich Himmler--who join in an even more unlikely enterprise: the freeing of Jews from concentration camps during the final months of WW II. The problem here is that Schwarz isn't very good on people: he utterly destroys Bernadotte (even for his own uses) by failing to plant any seeds of greatness, or even growth: ``Bernadotte's even being a gofer seemed to tax Bernadotte's abilities''; he was ``a self-centered playboy''; his sister ``knew her brother was immature, a spoiled rich boy with limited intelligence.'' Bernadotte, says Schwarz, ``seemed to envision the SS a little like summer sleep-away camp counsellors gathering the children together for parents' day.'' But somehow this incompetent cut a deal with the Nazis, and Schwarz gives no clear sense of how the miracle occurred. Jumping hither and thither in a kind of quasi-epic style, Schwarz obscures his story with a good deal of retold, peripheral material on the Goebbels family, and on events like the assassination of Heydrich and the subsequent razing of Lidice. Nor is Bernadotte's ``maturing process'' very clear; it's been rendered virtually impossible by the early description. The fascinating Yitzhak Shamir, dominant presence in the Stern Gang (generally assumed to have assassinated Bernadotte), never really comes into focus either, but his motives do: Bernadotte, proceeding on the Wilsonian notion of self-determination, proposed an Arab state that would allow Jews ``special rights.'' Like Wilson, he irritated everyone, especially the Stern Gang. A huge drama full of players on the grand scale, none of whom comes alive within the confines of this treatment. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The nominal subject of this book is Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish businessman who succeeded in rescuing thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and was assassinated in 1948 while on a diplomatic peace mission in the Middle East. However, most of the book is taken up by a disjointed rehashing of Nazi atrocities, along with a sketchy retelling of the more controversial of the British activities in Palestine. There are many better books dealing with the development of concentration camps in Germany and about the British role in Palestine and the founding of Israel. Bernadotte's own autobiographical writings ( The Curtain Falls , 1945; Instead of Arms , 1948; To Jerusalem , 1951) provide a far more cogent picture of the man and his life, and Amitzur Ilan's Bernadotte in Palestine (St. Martin's, 1989) is a much more carefully crafted study of Bernadotte's last mission. Pass on this.
- Barbara Walden, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
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