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The Search: The Birkenau Boys Paperback – November 1, 1998

5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating

Important Holocaust memoir by writer with a track record.
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From Publishers Weekly

A child survivor of the Holocaust, Durlacher long believed that he was the only person still alive from a group of 89 boys assigned to the Birkenau extermination camp in 1944. After he learned that he was wrong, he set himself the task of confronting his past by locating some of the others. As in many other Holocaust memoirs, the prose here is spare, and the lack of detail can be a little confusing. For example, the reader is thrown into the author's search without a description of the process that led him to take his journey. But some psychological truisms emerge in this gray travelogue that, while not fresh, are worth ruminating over. What the author, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who died in 1996, finds is that even though the survivors shared a common experience, how they have coped with their wartime suffering differs. Some, in particular those who have moved to Israel, meet regularly with other survivors; others keep their harrowing past buried deep in their psyches. Equally diverse are survivors' personal outlooks--despite what they have gone through, some of the "Birkenau Boys" still call themselves optimists, while others possess the bitterness one would expect. Not surprisingly, Durlacher, who wrote two previous books on the Holocaust, enjoyed the company of the former much more than the latter.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Serpent's Tail (November 1, 1998)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1852425407
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1852425401
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 1 rating

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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2010
    `Search for the Birkenau Boys' development and ending was not anticipated. The first question that came to mind was, `why?' What was the purpose in searching for the boys, and why have them relive the experience? To my surprise, it concerned me when the author, and others, began asking (in earnest) this unsettled question during the interviews.

    I got the distinct feeling of being rushed through the boys' experiences, relayed in a way that acknowledged other accounts already written on the Holocaust. Or perhaps it was relayed in this hurried fashion to spare `the boys', now men, from reliving the experience. Or just maybe it was me... possibly misinterpreting parts of the account lost through translation. All of these thoughts came to mind as Gerhard drove on, clearly determined to answer `why'.

    Aside from chronicling (forty years later) `individual' before, during, and after experiences of boys who survived Birkenau's Concentration Camp--in a range of coalescing views and memories--the `why' does get addressed... and addressed in a most respectable satisfying fashion.
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