BETWEEN TWO STREAMS:
A Diary from Bergen-Belsen
Abel Herzberg
Published by I B Tauris & Co Ltd
From Kirkus Reviews
An unusually probing, sensitive, and eloquent diary of incarceration at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Herzberg was a Dutch novelist and playwright, as well as a prominent lawyer, whose Holocaust diary only came to light after his death in 1989. He spent 15 months at Bergen-Belsen in a special section of the camp, where prisoners who possessed some status in the prewar world were kept alive for possible exchange with Allied-held Germans. As a result of their unique status, these "special" prisoners escaped the fate of others, who were worked to death or immediately killed. But life was not much easier: Seventy percent of the prisoners in Herzberg's section perished form malnutrition, disease, or torture. It is because Hetzberg lived to see so much, and because of his passion for justice and his basic decency, that this book towers over many more gruesome death-camp memoirs. He served as a kind of judge for his section of the camp, rendering decisions when, for instance, the widow of a millionaire was brought before him accused of stealing a ration of bread hoarded in a neighbour's lice-ridden mattress. Because collective punishment by the Germans was so swift and severe, Herzberg and other inmate leaders were constantly forced to strike a balance between punishing offenders (by withholding rations), and cooperating with Nazi sadism. It's deeply moving to read how so many resisted Nazi dehumanization and "cheated to give the other an extra slice of bread." Beyond the treatment of significant philosophical and psychological issues, the diary's strength is its eloquence and irony. When mired in tedium, the "days do not follow one another but coincide," while the final trauma of evacuation by train is "spotted fever on wheels." Harsh and gentle, intimate and public, these sparkling observations of human nature and values resonate with that spirit which cannot be beaten or starved out of us.
From The Jerusalem Post Magazine : Meir Ronnen
Herzberg's account of the minutiae of camp life is revealing in every line. A nonbeliever, lost somewhere in a sort of Mesopotamia between the two great streams of Judaism and Nazism, Herzberg admires both the Zionist halutzim and the Orthodox believers and marvels at the strength and solidarity the latter draw from their faith and rituals. One Jew refuses to shave his beard, an offense for which the punishment is death, but he somehow survives, revelling in his defiance. He is sent to hard labour, collapses, but does not give in. From bloody-mindedness comes strength. From his beard emerges laughter. Herzberg wrote in his diary that a Dutch Jew has more in common with a Dutch Gentile than with Jews from distant Diasporas, but he notes the extraordinary fellowship between Jews in Belsen, united by persecution and identical prayers. When a famous cantor sings in the camp, the Jews debate the quality of his voice. The worse things get in the camp, writes Herzberg, the watchword is : Hear O Israel, Jahveh is unity. Buoyed by news of the Allied landings and Russian victories, the prisoners find that things get considerably worse as defeats move the Germans to greater cruelties. The cruelties common to all camps include endless rollcalls in icy weather and the sending of the sick, the weak and the aged to hard work. The only way to defeat the SS is by slacking, and this the Belsen Jews do, even when beaten. Herzberg's account of Belsen's descent into starvation and death is heart-breaking. Days go by with nothing at all to eat. However, some flour is produced by the Jewish leadership for a Seder. The matzot taste "quite good". Of 45,000 prisoners, 17,000 die in March 1944.
From the Jewish Chronicle by John Jacobs
He writes much about the meaning of Judaism and of being Jewish; he observes the effects of the privations on individuals and on the various communities within the camp. It is a remarkable testimony written by a man with the capacity to reflect on the meanings of his experiences. As liberation approaches, conditions in the camp deteriorate, but even his first-hand descriptions would not have prepared an outsider for the sights with which we are now all familiar. As he himself says, words could never do justice to the horror.
