Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army by Georg Rauch (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army by Georg Rauch Elizabeth Bush Rauch, Georg Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army; tr. from the German by Phyllis Rauch. Farrar, 2015 325p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-374-30142-2 $17.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-374-30277-1 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-374-30143-9 $9.99 Ad Gr. 9-12 This memoir, self-published under the title The Jew with the Iron Cross: A Record of Survival in World War II Russia just prior to Rauch’s death in 2006, is now released as a book for young adults. Although he never attempted to hide his identity, Rauch, a Mischlinge (a mix of Aryan and Jewish) under the Nazi regime, was drafted into the German army at age nineteen. He served for two years, first in the trenches in Russia and then as a telegrapher in Romania, where he earned the Iron Cross by repairing a broken radio and ignoring protocol to reestablish communication ahead of a Russian attack. Toward the war’s end, Rauch attempted to desert but ended up as a prisoner of war in a Russian prison; armistice finally allowed him to make his way back to Austria, where his sister and mother had survived the war. Although younger readers with a strong interest in World War II and the Holocaust will be caught up in the details of Rauch’s soldiering experiences, it will take a reader of some maturity to parse the relationship between event and memory as it plays out in Rauch’s writing, which is inspired by letters (many included here) he wrote home as a young adult and revisited at the urging of a writers’ group some forty [End Page 511] years later. Additionally, there’s no exploration of what presumably was considerable and conscience-nagging ambivalence about his peculiar status, apart from a sense of irony that he was officially lauded by those who wanted to exterminate his kin. This very omission, however, could spark discussion in a class focused on the art of memoir or the challenges of historiography. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois