Boy 30529: A Memoir

by Felix Weinberg

Overview

A Holocaust survivor reflects on his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and the hardships of being a postwar refugee, in this deeply moving memoir written with surprising wit and humor.

In 1939, 12-year-old Felix Weinberg lost everything: hope, home, and even his own identity. Born into a respectable Czech family, Felix’s early years were idyllic. But when Nazi persecution threatened in 1938, his father travelled to England, hoping to arrange for his family to emigrate there. His efforts came too late—and his wife and children fell into the hands of the Fascist occupiers.

Thus begins a harrowing tale of survival, horror, and determination. Over the following years, Felix survived 5 concentration camps, including Terezín, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. Losing both his brother and mother in the camps, Felix was liberated at Buchenwald and eventually reunited at the age of 17 with his father in Britain, where they built a new life together.

An extraordinary memoir, as well as a meditation on the nature of memory. It helps us understand why the Holocaust remains a singular presence at the heart of historical debate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781683019
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	242,428
File size:	904 KB

About the Author

Felix Weinberg was a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia who settled in Britain after the war. Despite his formal education having been cut short at age twelve, he won a place at university and later become the first professor of Combustion Physics at Imperial College London. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the author or editor of four books and more than 220 scientific papers. Internationally acknowledged as a leading thinker in his field, he was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of London (1961), both the Silver (1972) and the Bernard Lewis Gold (1980) Medals of the Combustion Institute, Fellowship of the Royal Society (1983), the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal (1988), the D.Sc. Honoris Causa by Technion, Haifa (1990), the Italgas Prize for Energy Sciences (Turin Academy, 1991), and the Smolenski Medal of the Polish Academy of Science (1999), as well as being elected to the American National Academy of Engineering as a Foreign Associate in 2001. The Hugh Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Combustion Physics was conferred on him in 2005 (Institute of Physics). He died in December 2012.

Table of Contents

Foreword Suzanne Bardgett ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Preface xvii

Part I Childhood

Chapter 1 The Golden Years 1

Chapter 2 Dark Clouds 19

Chapter 3 The End of Hope 35

Part II The Camps

Chapter 4 Holocaust Literature and Reality 53

Chapter 5 Ghetto Theresienstadt (Terezín) 57

Chapter 6 Auschwitz-Birkenau 67

Chapter 7 Blechhammer 81

Chapter 8 The Longest Walk, The Coldest Train Journey 99

Chapter 9 Buchenwald 109

Part III The Return

Chapter 10 Prague 129

Chapter 11 Ústí nad Orlicí 133

Part IV England

Chapter 12 A Lancaster Bomber 145

Chapter 13 My Father 151

Chapter 14 Natural Philosophy 157

Appendix: Chronology 1942-45 167

Editorial Reviews

Moving – and genuine.”
—Daily Mail

“An unusually good-natured memoir about life in the Nazi camps and the travails of being a postwar refugee. Weinberg ... has a quick, curious mind...A revelation ... told with both candor and odd innocence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Told with an honest, contemporary, sometimes wry viewpoint, Weinberg’s graphic memories are haunting, as he searches the Web and historical archives to find out now what he did not know then, while it was happening to him: where he was marching, how many died. The dual perspective, then and now, and the blend of family intimacy (including occasional photos) with the gripping, authoritative historical overview make this an essential title for discussion.”
—Booklist

“All those who care about the proper documenting of this horrendous era must be grateful to Felix Weinberg for giving us this insightful and ultimately uplifting account.”
—Suzanne Bardgett, Imperial War Museum

“A very witty and highly readable account of life in Nazi camps, with truly original information and an amazing sense of humour. A great lesson in resilience, survival, hope – and genuine modesty.”
—Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust

“A sensitive, witty, intelligent – and ultimately, extremely moving – memoir.”
—Richard Zimler, author of The Warsaw Anagrams

“Felix Weinberg’s memoir stands out from other Holocaust memoirs in its accomplished style, its powers of exact recollection and depiction and in its dry humour.”
—Professor Charmian Brinson, author of The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm

“With a detachment that makes the telling all the more powerful, Felix Weinberg has given witness to what he saw and experienced through the terror, misery and absurdity of his teenage years ... [It] is the reply of a boy who escaped annihilation and found that by staying alive he could think, study, research and eventually teach at the highest level. In the face of genocide on any people, anywhere at any time, the book is the ultimate response: that we exist and have the right to exist. I wasn’t only moved by it. I was strengthened by it.”
—Michael Rosen, author, poet

From the Publisher

A very witty and highly readable account of life in Nazi camps, with truly original information and an amazing sense of humour. A great lesson in resilience, survival, hope – and genuine modesty.

Gilbert Achcar

Felix Weinberg’s memoir stands out from other Holocaust memoirs in its accomplished style, its powers of exact recollection and depiction and in its dry humour.

Professor Charmian Brinson

All those who care about the proper documenting of this horrendous era must be grateful to Felix Weinberg for giving us this insightful and ultimately uplifting account.

Suzanne Bardgett

A sensitive, witty, intelligent – and ultimately, extremely moving – memoir.

Richard Zimler

Felix Weinberg’s memoir stands out from other Holocaust memoirs in its accomplished style, its powers of exact recollection and depiction and in its dry humour.

Charmian Brinson

An unusually good-natured memoir about life in the Nazi camps and the travails of being a postwar refugee. Weinberg, now a British physicist, had not planned to write a memoir, until a spate of well-publicized fake Holocaust survivor memoirs came out a few years ago. He does no specific debunking here but instead writes from the point of view of a privileged young man, barely a teenager, whose natural mode is playfulness, not meditation, and who has a quick, curious mind. Born into a Jewish family that also celebrated Christmas--the good timing of his brother's birth, he writes, "brought me a three-year extension of Christmases" before the Nazis came into his native Czechoslovakia. On the Nazis, Weinberg waxes sardonic: He writes, for example, that Heinrich Himmler began the program of medical experimentation in the camps after failing to breed chickens successfully enough to make a living as a poultry farmer. "The most inventive of satirists could not have invented that one," he writes. "It would be hilarious were it not for the millions of lives lost." Weinberg does allow that the Nazis had one good idea, namely throwing him out of school and putting an end to "the only conventional school education I ever had." Sent to Terezin and then Buchenwald, Weinberg endured long enough to see, most satisfyingly, the liberation of the camps by black American soldiers--and just in time, since the prisoners were bent on hanging their SS guards, who departed so quickly that "they left their uniforms and weapons in the barracks for us to play with." Minor, perhaps, but a revelation all the same, told with both candor and odd innocence.

Kirkus Reviews