Review by Janice Arnold --
"Two new memoirs by Montreal survivors make important contributions to the Holocaust canon.
Hungarian-born Hermann Gruenwald’s After Auschwitz: One Man’s Story, as told to Bryan Demchinsky, business editor of the Montreal Gazette, is published by McGiull-Queen’s University Press, while Romanian native Yossi Indig self-published A Promise to My Mother: Memories of a Life Shaped by the Holocaust.
Both authors have remarkable memories and gifts for storytelling, as well as candour.
Gruenwald, born in 1925, grew up in a well-to-do landowning, liberal-thinking family in the northern Hungarian village of Rohod. He recalls an idyllic, sheltered world that soon would be shattered by an evil no one could have imagined.
"Growing up in Rohod during the 1930s was like living in an enchanted garden with a pack of wolves lurking nearby. We were isolated in our backwater village and lulled by the enduring traditions of rural life," he remembers.
Gruenwald, his parents and four siblings were deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. He entered the death camp as a still naïve, rather vain, youth. That would change soon. One of the teenager’s first jobs was grinding up human bones that had not been totally consumed in the crematoria.
Through chance, he got a coveted job working in the camp’s kitchens, and was soon "promoted" to cook, a rare position for a Jew and one that had the advantage of being able to get enough to eat and other perks. "Among the inmates of Auschwitz, we were the aristocrats," Gruenwald writes.
He was among the group that also cooked for the SS officers, including the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, who enjoyed mean and other fine foods inmates could only dream of.
Gruenwald describes the man who made the selections from the incoming trains, and unknown to him at the time, carrying on cruel medical experiments, as a civil person who would greet the kitchen staff daily.
Gruenwald writes frankly about the thievery and black market that flourished. The belongings confiscated from prisoners, stored in warehouses known satirically as Canada Kommando, were pilfered and bartered. Gruenwald himself had acquired a couple of suits this way that he was allowed to wear when not working.
He admits he quickly became hardened to horrific circumstances, like the frequent hangings that were required watching. "I never though of the man who was going to be hanged. I was 10 or 15 yards away from a life about to be snuffed out, and all I could think of was, ‘Let’s get this over with so I can go back ot the barracks and enjoy my free time.’"
Not proud of it today, Gruenwald reflects, "Your senses are deadened. You are wood. You do your job. Maybe Mengele figured he was like that—just doing his job."
After the Russians entered Auschwitz in January 1945, Gruenwald was forced along with several thousand in a march of almost a week through the winter to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. He soon was sent to Gusen II, a nearby camp where he slaved in an aircraft plant, slowly starving. The dead piled up.
"One morning when I woke up, one of the men in my bunk was dead beside me. In Gusen II, death lay next to all of us, so this event, which should have been traumatic, wasn’t. It was the natural order."
So natural that young Gruenwald was resigned to his own end. Only the U.S. Army’s liberation of the camp in May 1945 saved him.
Gruenwald returned to Hungary and tried to start over, but could not live under communism. He immigrated to Canada in 1950 and prospered in the garment industry, as owner of Reliably Hosiery, and in real estate."
- As printed in The Canadian Jewish News, August 23, 2007.
