Resumo de The Last Jews In Berlin

On February 27th 1943, Goebbels issued the order to round up
Berlin''s
remaining Jews, protected until then because they worked in armaments factories
or other key positions. Thousands escaped and went underground, becoming U-Boats, and a few hundred survived the war. The Last Jews in
Berlin tells the story of seven of these, and of members of the Swedish
church in Berlin
who helped to save Jews.

Gross skillfully weaves his story together, moving between the protagonists
to maintain continuous tension. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of their
lives is their variety. Some were by themselves, others had children, spouses,
or parents with them. Some spent most of the war in hiding; others were linked
to more organized resistance networks and could obtain false papers. They
maintained themselves by sewing, by black-market trade in jewels, or by the
charity of others. Some snuck into opera and theatre performances; others found
romance in unlikely circumstances.

Gross also works the background history into the narrative naturally,
without interrupting the flow of his stories. Based on interviews carried out
in 1967 and again in 1978, The Last Jews in Berlin is oral history,
but Gross seems to me to have done a good job of evaluating the evidence by its plausibility, consistency, and comprehensiveness. Only the
occasional passage seems like an obvious retrospective intrusion:

But what the Riedes received from the Wirkuses was far
more important than food or shelter and the confirmation of friendship. It was
the knowledge that there were German Gentiles who cared for them to the point
of risking their lives.

Which leads to my first caveat. There are no villains in The Last Jews
in Berlin. Only the Jewish Catchers, employed to betray their
own, are foregrounded ? none of the Gestapo have faces, nor do the Germans who
assisted in, or profited from, the capture and deportation of Jews. Instead we
meet continuous stream of Catholic anti-Nazis, sympathetic Prussian policemen,
and so forth. Perhaps this genuinely reflects the experiences of those Jews
lucky enough to survive, but it surely distorts the overall picture. (It may
reflect post-war German amnesia ? all the protagonists of The Last Jews in
Berlin remained in Germany
after the war.)

Perhaps the most serious problem is unsolvable: to tell the stories of the
survivors is to shadow those of the dead, and who can speak for them? The
epilogue explains that none of the friends and relatives of the protagonists
deported to concentration camps in the course of the book survived, but it does
so incidentally, tacked onto a mention of a White Russian taken by the Russians
and never heard from again. I would have liked to have seen a list of those
dead, with the place and manner of their deaths where known, to give some idea
of just how atypical the survivors were.

Though perhaps best read alongside other books on the Holocaust, The
Last Jews in Berlin is a powerful and gripping portrait of life in Berlin during the Second
World War.

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