Holocaust memoir a warning for all

CHOSEN, by Eta Fuchs Berk with Gilbert Allardyce, Goose Lane, 140 pages, $9.95.

In “Chosen,” Eta Fuchs Berk raises her voice to drown out those who deny the Holocaust occurred, a major reason she decided to write this memoir.

The Hungarian government resisted Hitler’s Final Solution in the early years of World War II, so Eta Berk, like most Hungarian Jews, avoided the mass slaughter.

Still, what she did experience and witness was horror. “Dead bodies,” she relates, “simply went with the landscape at Auschwitz.” The weak and the starving died at night, in what she ironically terms “natural selection.” Then there was the Nazi practice of shipping ill prisoners to the gas chambers instead of the infirmary, their stated destination.

To relate some of the happenings before Eta Berk’s incarceration, “Chosen,” unlike any memoir I’ve ever read, draws often on other primary and some secondary sources about the Holocaust, such as the writings of Primo Levi, “The Last 100 Days,” and the film “Kitty: Return to Auschwitz.” These works reinforce Berk’s memory well and add details she could not have known.

“Chosen” also illuminates the conditions and problems of the displaced person camps to which Holocaust survivors were taken. In that period of world turmoil, Eta Berk began to find normalcy. In the DP camp she was reunited with the remaining two members of her family, and there she met her future husband, Myer Berkowitz.

By its nature as a Holocaust memoir, this book is a horrific, chilling account. Its only drawback is a slight lack of unity as a whole. Even so, it is an excellent read and a warning for all humankind.

Joe Jordan lives in Chester.