August 13, 2007
Halter, a noted architect of Israel's Holocaust memorial, builds his memoir of “hell” under Hitler's regime with unadorned prose and steel resolve. In the late 1930s, anti-Semitism infects the Polish village of Chodecz, where Halter had lived in a tight Jewish clan rocked only by sibling spats. Synagogues are torched; Jews endure humiliations; and after the 1939 invasion, Halter, a schoolboy, is pressed into service as a flunky for the German town kapo. Slipping into prayer to staunch his panic, Halter braves deportation to the Lodz ghetto, where his family survives on scraps while somehow keeping its dignity; Halter's dying grandfather recites grace even over his last morsels. Halter ascribes his survival to the resilience shared by other child prisoners who “after every knock-out blow, sprang back to life.” After being sent to Auschwitz, Stutthof and Dresden, where he barely survived the bombing of early 1945, Halter risks an audacious escape and returns to Chodecz, his bittersweet homecoming cut with profound sorrow for a town irrevocably changed and bereft of Jewish community. Halter stubbornly conveys both harrowing loss and hunger for renewed life with measured matter-of-factness that allows his ordeals to speak for themselves.