Boy from Buchenwald: The True Story of a Holocaust Survivor by Robbie Waisman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boy from Buchenwald: The True Story of a Holocaust Survivor by Robbie Waisman Elizabeth Bush Waisman, Robbie Boy from Buchenwald: The True Story of a Holocaust Survivor; by Robbie Waisman with Susan McClelland. Bloomsbury, 2021 [288 p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 9781547606009 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781547606016 $13.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 6-10 "On April 11, 1945, the American Army came and set me free. I wasn't alone. At that camp, hidden among 21,000 surviving prisoners, were 1,000 boys just like me." So says Romek Waisman, fourteen years old when he was transferred into the protection of the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) in France, where their half-feral and combative behavior had some psychiatrists suspecting they might be too damaged to successfully reenter society. In this memoir Waisman revisits his three years spent with the OSE, relearning how to eat, reluctantly accepting the need for further education, reuniting briefly with his older sister before she moved to Palestine, learning how to talk to a girl, expanding his cultural horizons under the patronage of a wealthy family that offered to adopt him, and preparing to choose his own new home in Canada, where he emigrates at seventeen. The framing of this memoir invites readers to consider Romek as a near agemate, and although his [End Page 444] interspersed accounts of experience at work- and death camps are unquestionably grim, it's the total disorientation and alone-ness of his newly liberated period that provokes a chilling "What if it were me?" focus. End matter addresses Waisman's later involvement in humanitarian causes and Holocaust education, discusses the OSE organization, and offers a World War II/Holocaust timeline. This moving personal narrative will ably serve as a companion volume to Monica Hesse's They Went Left (BCCB 4/20) Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois