Because of Romek: A Holocaust Survivor's Memoir Review

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(More customer reviews)Because of Romek is one of a large and growing number of books about the Shoah(the Hebrew word for the Holocaust), written as a first person (survivors) narrative of the events which took place. It is the story of David Faber, an adolescent Polish-Jewish boy who spent most of his teenage years surviving Nazi murder through a series of almost amazing twists of fate. During the almost six years of Nazi domination of his life he personally witnessed the murder of his five sisters, a brother(Romek) and both parents. More than that though, this is a story of one Jewish boy's struggle to survive in the almost impossible conditions of Nazi Europe.
This is a short narrative as many of these types of stories do tend to be, although at times it even had the feel of a Reader's Digest condensed book. This was due to the font size which for whatever reason was chosen to be somewhat large on the pages and also the fact that this story is not very detailed when it comes to issues of everyday life under the Nazis. At several points in the book it actually seems to jump from one tragedy to another. In pointing out these issues I am in no way suggesting that they lessen the value of this account; the brevity and condensed nature does however lessen the impact to a certain degree.That being the case, this is definitely the type of book that one could read in one long sitting.
One thing that strikes the reader of this account is the number of different types of experiences which David had to survive. Somehow he made it through the initial wave of violence that rolled over the community where his family had fled. After that he was taken by the Germans to a forced labor camp where he escaped only to be taken in by a group of Russian partisans for a period of time. After this he somehow survived a long string of Nazi brutality and murder which followed him from Ghettos and a number of the most deadly camps that the Nazis built during their attempt at genocide.
Due to the length of this book and relative ease of reading, this certainly would be an outstanding supplementary text for high school students or even college survey classes on modern European history. It is just the type of narrative to introduce one to the types of murder and brutality which were commonplace for the victims and survivors of the Shoah- the most deliberate effort in history to eliminate an entire ethnic group.


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Because of Romek is a nonfiction, autobiographical narrative about the experiences of a teenager during the Holocaust of World War II. This is the riveting, true story of a young boy's survival in the face of Nazi atrocities.In the mid-1960s, the German government contacted David Faber to testify against Nazi war criminals. Until then, he did not know that his older brother, Romek, whom the Nazis had tortured to death many years earlier, had been involved in a Polish Underground plot to avert Nazi Germany's ability to create an atomic bomb. When David finally agreed to testify, he began to relive all the horrors of his experiences during the war: concentration camps, murders, tortures, starvation, and disease. When David Faber was 13 years old, he had witnessed the Nazi murders of his parents, brother Romek, and five of his six sisters. He survived nine concentration camps between the ages of 13-18, from 1939 to 1945, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When he was liberated in 1945 from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, he weighed a mere 72 pounds. Because of Romek fulfills David's promise to his dead mother that he would survive and tell the world about the horrors committed against him and his family.This moving narrative is also a useful tool for educators. To today's students, the Holocaust too often seems to be an abstract event in the dim past. Because of Romek pulls the reader into the story, thereby illuminating the past and putting a face on history.

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