One Bridge to Life

In 1939, Samelson, now a professor at Trinity University (Tex.), was an 11-year old violin prodigy living in Poland. A year later, he had a secret bar mitzvah in a Nazi labor camp. His mother and sister had been sent to their deaths; he and his brother escaped and became members of a group of partisans. Captured, they were returned to a camp and later liberated to join a father subsumed by the hatred that had helped him to survive, and a postwar world in which many Nazis went unpunished. Eventually Samelson came to the realization that some of his enemies had been caught, as he and his family were caught, in the machinery of evil. ``One condemned understands another,'' he writes in this heartfelt memoir that is affecting for its intensity and as a survivor's search for an affirmative post-Holocaust life. (Dec.)