On the Run in Nazi Berlin: A Memoir

This remembrance of a teen’s struggle to survive the Holocaust won’t provide readers familiar with similar memoirs new insights. In 1942, the author and his parents were taken from their Berlin apartment by the Nazis and separated. Lewyn’s experience as an apprentice in machine building and metalworking spared him for a time, as he was put to work in a munitions factory. A chance encounter with a non-Jewish coworker alerted him to the Germans’ decision to send the factory’s Jewish workers to a death camp, allowing Lewyn to escape the roundup. He spent the remainder of WWII dodging capture, aided by the occasional selfless stranger, his own resourcefulness, and lucky breaks—one of which was that he was saved from being shot by liberating Russian forces when one of them, who happened also to be Jewish, believed Lewyn wasn’t a Nazi because he had read a textbook that Lewyn’s Russian uncle had written. The book could be better organized; Saltzman Lewyn, the author’s daughter-in-law, bafflingly places two sections of Lewyn’s reminiscences in appendices, rather than chronologically within the main text. Despite this, this memoir will be informative for those who have not viewed the Nazi extermination of European Jewry from an individual’s perspective. [em](Mar.) [/em]