Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-labor Camp

"In 1972 the Hamburg State Court acquitted Walther Becker of war crimes committed against Jews. Thirty years before, Becker, the German chief of police in the Polish city of Starachowice, had been responsible for liquidating the nearby Jewish ghetto, sending nearly 4,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka and 1,600 to slave labor in the local munitions factories. The shocking acquittal, delivered despite the incriminating eyewitness testimony of almost sixty survivors, drives Christopher R. Browning's inquiry." "Employing the rich testimony of almost three hundred survivors of these slave-labor camps, Browning's history draws together the experiences of the Jewish prisoners, the Nazi authorities, and the neighboring Poles. For the Jews the camps, brutal and deadly as conditions were, represented their best chance for survival. There they lived under corrupt camp regimes and produced for the German war effort even as they sacrificed to protect children, spouses, parents, or neighbors." "For the Germans the camps, critical to munitions production, were anomalies in the systematic killing of Jews. Himmler's "harvest-festival" massacre of November 1943, when 42,000 Jewish workers in Poland's eastern camps were killed in two days, largely spared the western camps. But in a selection days later, some 160 Starachowice prisoners were taken to the forest, shot, and buried in a mass grave. Arbitrary killing was an ever-present threat even under the most pragmatic camp regime. For the Poles the factories provided a meager employment. Some actively aided Jewish neighbors in the camps. Others made this region a stronghold for anti-Semitic and extremist partisan forces, with the highest incidence of postwar killing of Jews in Poland." --Book Jacket.