Passport to Life

Book excerpt: Memoirs of a Jew who was born as Emanuel Tenenwurzel in 1928 in Vilna and moved to Miechów as a child. The Polish antisemitism he experienced before the war worsened under German occupation. In early 1941 his family was interned in the Miechów ghetto, whose Judenrat he depicts as facilitating Jewish survival. His family escaped deportation and he hid in a Catholic monastery. He was sexually abused by a monk there, then hidden by a member of the Polish underground in a village. From there a good German helped him get to Kraków, where his mother and sister hid. After escaping to Hungary, he was caught trying to emigrate to Eretz Israel. He was briefly incarcerated in Yugoslavia and then in Budapest, where he met the paratrooper Peretz Goldstein, who had been sent to occupied Europe from Palestine. Claims that the paratroopers did not strengthen Jewish resistance, but increased the risk to the local Jewish underground. Under the Arrow Cross regime, he managed to obtain "Aryan" papers. After the war he encountered anti-Jewish hostility in Miechów and learned that his father had perished; he lived for some time in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1952. Pp. 219-278, "Reflections", discuss hate, Islamic fundamentalism, genocide, Christianity and the Holocaust, and Holocaust historiography. Contends that to survive was heroic, to revolt was suicidal.