Himmler's Jewish Tailor

Book excerpt: Jacob Frank survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Dachau and the little-known Lipowa Labor Camp in Poland. His extraordinary skills as a tailor led him to head Heinrich Himmler's two-hundred-fifty-tailor operation, and put him into contact with such notorious SS officers as Eichmann, Gaeth, and Globocnik. An eyewitness to major Nazi operations and atrocities, Frank's intimate knowledge of beatings, torture, and murder brought him to Hamburg in 1974 to testify in the war crimes trial of Wolfgang Mohwinkel and other SS officers. Frank's account of his imprisonment at Lipowa details how factories operated within the labor camp system, the construction of Majdanek, and how he learned of mass shootings in nearby villages. The only survivor of his sixty-four-member family, Frank provides the only firsthand account in English of Lublin and the destruction of its Jewish quarter. Amid the horrors and everyday minutia of life under the Nazis, he reflects on the role of faith, the will to live, and the temptation of suicide. Frank also examines survivor guilt, Jewish identity, the psychology of victims and perpetrators, and the role of memory.