Survival Artist, A Memoir of the Holocaust (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Survival Artist, A Memoir of the Holocaust John S. Schuchman (bio) Eugene Bergman, Survival Artist, A Memoir of the Holocaust (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2009, 204 pp., paper, $35, ISBN 978-0-7864-4134-1) Eugene Bergman's Survival Artist is a personal account of his family's Holocaust experience. Although Bergman, a retired Gallaudet professor, is a deaf individual, he did not encounter deaf people or deaf culture until his arrival in the United States after World War II. He became deaf at the age of nine as the result of an attack by a soldier shortly after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Unfamiliar with deafness, his family later employed a Jewish-German refugee speech teacher to teach the young boy how to lipread even though Bergman spoke only Polish and Yiddish, both of which were unknown to the teacher. Needless to say, the lessons failed. Throughout the war years, the young Bergman only could lipread and understand the words of his older brother, Bronek. Since his survival often depended on it, Bergman became an astute observer of people in order to understand the awful milieu that was the Holocaust. At the outset, I should point out that Eugene Bergman and I were faculty colleagues at Gallaudet, and I have heard a few of his public presentations about the Holocaust. In those limited presentations, he has referred to the rifle butt to his head that caused his deafness and his efforts to avoid detection of his circumcision as a Jew when asked to drop his pants. I am glad that he has decided to offer up a more complete memoir of his experience. He is a justifiably proud man and his story of survival and personal achievement is worth reading. [End Page 382] Survival Artist is the account of one family's "survival" of the war years, 1939–1945. The family consisted of his parents, Eugene, and his older brothers Bronek and Dadek. They stayed together as a family unit until the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 when German soldiers murdered his father and eldest brother Dadek. Professor Bergman has written his memoir based on secondary sources as well as the recollections of his brother Bronek and himself. Fluent in both Polish and Yiddish, the family members masked their Jewish identities and pretended to be Polish Christians. Bergman often refers to the physical characteristics of being "blonde and blueeyed," not Jewish-looking. Combined with their mastery of the Polish language, they survived while their father used his experience and skills as a small business entrepreneur to find food and lodging for the family. Originally from Poznan in western Poland, the family sought refuge from round-ups and deportation to the concentration camps in the East. They moved to Jewish ghettos in Lodz, Warsaw, Czestochowa, and then back to Warsaw. They finally moved out of the ghetto into the central part of Warsaw where they survived for two years until the Warsaw Uprising. Throughout this period, Bergman's father lived outside the ghetto and posed as a Polish businessman where he traveled and traded to find food and money for his family. Although constantly exposed to the cruelty and anti-Semitism of both German soldiers and the native Polish population, the young Bergman managed to educate himself. He describes his older brother Bronek as street smart and his eldest brother Dadek as an intellectual. Bergman incorporated both into his education. He wandered the streets where he learned not to look Jewish when necessary and to avoid danger despite his hearing loss. And he read books. Following the lead of Dadek, he developed what would become his life-long love for literature and philosophy. The memoir is replete with literary and cinematic references. Though proud of his Polish intellectual heritage, Bergman graphically describes the cruel anti-Semitism of his Christian neighbors. Aware of the dichotomy of so many impoverished starving Jews in the ghetto and his own family's ability to obtain what it needed to survive through money, bribes, and plain luck, Bergman survived. With [End Page 383] the Warsaw Uprising, the family unit came to an end. Bronek and Eugene were away when the Germans...