Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora | 
 enlarge | Authors: Pierre Berg, Brian Brock
Publisher: AMACOM
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 195525
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 0814412998
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5318092
EAN: 9780814412992
ASIN: 0814412998
Publication Date: September 3, 2008
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Condition: Brand New. 100% money back guarantee. All books shipped from Strand Bookstore, New York City, USA.
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Book Description
In 1943, eighteen year old Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend’s house—at the same time as the Gestapo. He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he managed to survive...and ultimately got out alive. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Berg, “it was all shithouse luck, which is to say—inelegantly—that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life.” Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, Scheisshaus Luck recounts Berg’s constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg’s time in Auschwitz, his hair’s breadth avoidance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing “death march” out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis’ V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces. Utterly frank and tinged with irony, irreverence, and gallows humor, Scheisshaus Luck ranks in importance among the work of fellow survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazi's “Final Solution,” Berg's memoir stands as a searing reminder of how the Holocaust affected us all.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 58 more reviews...
 Couldn't put it down October 11, 2008
Decided to read some of the book. Just a chapter. Maybe two. Got stuck reading the whole thing from cover to cover in one day. Pierre's story is fascinating, detailed, and obviously very personal. You can't say you "enjoyed" the book because the subject matter is not enjoyable. But it offers one of the better examples of the twists and turns that allowed some to survive and others not. It is also, as is noted in the appendix, a unique perspective of life in the camps from the viewpoint of a young, non-Jewish, internee. I highly recommend it for it's historical value as well as it's intimate depictions of the casual callousness of war and it's ability to bring out both the best and the worst human behaviour.
Yes, do read this. October 3, 2008
I've read countless accounts, short and long, on the holocaust. Berg's piece can take its place alongside the important works of Weisel, Ten Boom, and Steiner.
Each eyewitness retelling of the experience reads differently. Not because history is subjective, but rather each writer is simply sharing their own hellish experience from the perspective of the small world through which they survived. Each story is coloured by the age, gender, religious belief system, personality, and circumstances of the author. In the present case -- an 18 year old gentile snatched up with the Jews and shipped to Auschwitz (then marched on to Dora). He is strong-willed, resourceful and clever, and "lucky". He survives.
He was a young man, not a child, not an observant Jew, and writes with a sense of dark, wry humor - mindful of the bad and good circumstances through which he survived. As always, the story is horrific. It is important that these memoirs are put to paper. Each tells the story of a survivor and 6 million non-survivors. This one is well told. Recommended.
 Worthy Addition to Canon of Survivor Stories October 2, 2008
The absorbing account of a young French resistance courier's capture by the Nazis, Scheisshaus Luck is a valuable addition to the library of WWII survivor stories. The title refers to the random nature of life and death, freedom and capture that prevailed in the occupied territories. The reader must be impressed by author Pierre Berg's remarkable resourcefulness and resilience as a "guest" of the Nazis at Auschwitz and Dora camps. Berg answers two questions I have long wondered: what kind of person could survive the Nazi camps without losing all humanity, and what kept these poor souls going in this terrible Hell on earth? (The answer to the latter here is the author's love of a girl, whom he believes he re-encounters near the end of the story.) Scheisshaus Luck is especially useful for its detail of the death march prisoners had to endure, even as Russian liberators were days away. I am deducting one star from my rating, for this book, as interesting and well written as it is, falls just short of the top tier of survival stories. It is ironic that the author's sang-froid and sense of humor that were so essential to his survival here undermine his effort. This book does not get your blood boiling about the Nazi atrocities, nor does it get your tears flowing. For that, I recommend 80629: A Mengele Experiment, which is the most harrowing account of human suffering and barbarity I have ever read.
Another Perspective Well Worth The Read September 30, 2008
Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend's house, but he most certainly didn't pick the wrong time to team up with Brian Bock. Together this writing team has picked through a Halocaust experience with wisdom and wit. I am sure this work was a struggle to reach into some deep memories so that a history from the view of the imprisoned resistance fighters could be told. Very well done!
Gripping tale from a Gentile victim of the Nazi Horror. September 29, 2008
Author Pierre Berg adds a fresh perspective to the well established post-Holocaust literature. As a young French teenager, he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while visiting a friend's house at the same time as the SS and he found himself plunged into the nightmarish world of the Nazi concentration camps. If we can believe his account, he survived from a combination of being non-Jewish, athletically fit, being bright and resourceful, his multilingual talents and from pure dumb luck- hence the title. Although conditions were better for non-Jews, the suffering endured by the protagonist and those around him was horrifying enough. Mr. Berg, however, always seemed to keep his wits about him and that more than anything, kept him alive. This is a very straightforward telling of a fantastic tale and one is struck by the strength of his survival instinct as well as his inborn gallic cynicism- a healthy cynicism, it turns out. Though one cannot help but reel at the atrocities he was forced to witness and endure, he never seems to lose his cool, save when, after his liberation, he fails to find the girl he was romantically entangled with at the start of his ordeal. It's an understandable lapse. This sense of detachment keeps the book from collapsing under the weight of the appalling suffering detailed within. I was a little disturbed by his indifference to the forced rape that occurs throughout much of the book and though he belatedly offers apologies for his insensitivity, it struck me as a little false. That point aside, I was riveted throughout most of the read. Although this book is a bit late to the dance, it is a very readable and valuable addition to the history of that accursed time.
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