Letter from Yad Vashem

[sonia]

I'm on the mailing list for Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. They send out a newsletter once every few months.

I got one today with a book review/summary of "A Boy from Buština: A Son. A Survivor. A Witness." by Andrew Burien, review by Blu Greenberg. I'm reproducing it here in its entirety because these Holocaust stories need to be heard and remembered. Note: Even a summary of a Holocaust experience is harrowing to read.


Review by Blu Greenberg

I read A Boy from Buština six months ago and cannot get it out of my mind. It came to me quite by chance. As hardly anyone else I know has heard of this book, this author or this place, perhaps it is time to write a review.

Here is the story of Andrew Burian, swept into the Holocaust in 1944 at age thirteen and liberated one year later by African-American soldiers. What he endures in that horrific interlude is the gripping core of this book, written over the course of 30 years. Some of the images, the ones that return to me every night, are excruciating; some are noble and inspiring. Yet, there is nothing in this book that can be called morbid or preachy. In fact, the writing is spare and straightforward, as a first-person Holocaust account necessarily must be for a reader like myself to digest seven decades later.

The town of Buština, with its greenery and intersecting rivers at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, was then part of the Czech Republic. Buština is 25 miles from Sighet, home of Elie Wiesel who was also taken in 1944 to Auschwitz, at age fourteen. Wiesel details his experience in his world classic, Night. Because control of that area changed hands during the war, Burian, like Wiesel, suffered at the hands of Hungarians and Ukrainians, who collaborated with the Nazis. Burian lacks the power of Wiesel’s understated poetry, but offsets that by giving more detail. In that sense, his book supplements Night. Burian’s memory for detail, confirmed by historians who added footnotes to the narrative, is extraordinary.

Andrew’s story begins with his idyllic childhood in a modern Orthodox, upper-middle-class family supported by lumber and other business interests. He and his brother enjoy a childhood rich with tradition, the warmth of a large extended family, an emphasis on education and hard work and a home lush with parental love and care – quite evocative of ideal Orthodox family life of today.

The poignancy of his descriptions is heightened by the reader’s sense of impending doom. One reads of the beautiful family Shabbat dinners, complete with two sets of grandparents, knowing that the curtain is coming down.

And it does. Very soon. The world of evil progresses rapidly, supplanting the world of good and innocence that he has known. One of the most painful scenes takes place at the entry to the "stopover" ghetto where his family is detained before being shipped in locked cattle cars to Auschwitz. The family of four is "interrogated" in one room together. Young Andy, his father and brother must witness his mother being forced to crouch while the Hungarian policemen, using the crook of a walking cane, do an internal search of her body for hidden treasure. He does not detail his own trauma at the scene. But I, separated by decades and oceans, am gripped by it.

Andy describes the screams of the elderly Mrs. Elefant being searched in the same fashion and the beating her husband suffers as he tries to protect his wife’s dignity. And Andy conveys his rude awakening as he reports the sad conversation later that night with his father, who explains their powerlessness. As an aside to us, he describes how he came to realize then that his invincible father could no longer take care of him in the face of incomprehensible violence.

In Auschwitz, this skinny, picky eater, mama’s boy of 13 is separated almost immediately from his mother, father and brother, left to survive on his own in an unimaginable world. How does he manage to do this, with considerable dignity no less? He calls on many resources, his own and others.

There’s the recently arrived Hungarian doctor in his barracks whose medical advice saves his life one feverish, vomiting night but whom he sadly cannot acknowledge by name for the rest of his life because the doctor’s number is called in the morning, before Andy awakens. There’s the truck backed up to the door of his sealed barracks, loaded by whipping guards. Its human cargo is to be delivered directly into the doors of the gas chamber to prevent the victims from scattering and escaping; However, construction at this particular crematorium has blocked direct access so the victims alight and scatter. Bullets fly. Beatings crack skulls. Andy is small enough to crawl inside a large round concrete pipe/tube and stay there until he hears silence. Another saving miracle, he calls it. Andy describes one harrowing escape after another, each reflecting a measure of ingenuity, luck and perhaps divine intervention.

He lives by his father’s parting words to him, as father is marched off to a slave labor camp: stay clean so that you will not get sick, do not lose your humanity even as you see beastly behavior all around you, and return home after the war. He lives by his wits, sleeping outside the barracks door to avoid being summoned by the kapo for pleasure; yet he also suffers great pain as he hears the cries through the night of another young boy being abused.

Andy lives for his endless longing and search for his beloved mother who, unbeknownst to him, went up in smoke along with her father and uncle the very night they arrived in Auschwitz. He lives by his sheer will to live: on the infamous Auschwitz Death March, the Nazi’s last-stab winter evacuation, Andy mentally separates from his body his swollen, bleeding, frozen feet. By sheer will again, he manages to survive a second death march during the evacuation of Mauthausen, the Austrian concentration camp he is sent to after Auschwitz. He lives by soothing memories of home triggered by the sight of a blue sky, white clouds or other glimpses of nature’s beauty. And he lives by a healthy joy at seeing Nazis suffer at the hands of the Russian army.

His honesty never wanes. After liberation, the Americans hand him over to the Russians since Czechoslovakia is now in the Russian sphere of influence. For a very short time he runs with a pack of crude and vengeful former prisoners. He is not proud of his behavior and regrets that short period for the rest of his life.

To me, every book of testimony on the Holocaust is a treasure and this is an outstanding one of its genre, one of the most important books I have read in the past several years. I give it five stars. Not only should every Jew read it but every human being, for it reminds us of how vigilant we must be against bottomless evil. Yet one must also read this book because ultimately it is a story of goodness triumphing over evil, of the will to live trumping surrender to despair, and of human love that is fiercer than death.

Still, in the end it is very sad to think of how many adorable and smart bar mitzvah boys just like Andy went to their deaths. I feel grateful that Andrew Burian survived to build a second life – and to tell his story.

(2016) ISBN: 978-965-308-517-6, Cat. No. 915
238 pp., hard cover, 15X23 cm.