Author: Barbara P. Barnett

ISBN 0-9743158-7-7

The following review was contributed by:Kathryn Atwood Click Here To View More Of Kathryn's Reviews

            “We pose the question: how could [the Holocaust] happen in Christian Europe, in the most civilized country, that of great philosophers, musicians and poets?”  This quote from Auschwitz survivor Marcel Jabelot is the question he asked all his adult life, the question that prompted him to study history for the last fifteen years of that life in order to find an answer.  Barbara Barnett’s book, Faces of the Holocaust: Marcel Jabelot seeks to keep asking the question.

            Between 1993 and 1994, Barnett conducted videotaped interviews of Jabelot for her prize-winning video.  Her book is a transcription of these interviews, plus three speeches given by Jabelot on occasions related to Holocaust history.  Obviously geared towards the classroom, it also contains questions for review and discussion and includes letters written by Jabelot to students who had personally contacted him.

                                                The book is quite short (96 pages total), so it doesn’t have the lengthy detail contained in a book like Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz, but it does contain a very interesting slant not found in Levi’s book.  The picture on the book’s cover shows a well-adjusted, healthy, middle-aged man who smiles contentedly at the camera.   It’s not until you finish reading his testimony that you realize the scars he bears from his Holocaust experience are larger than the still visible number tattooed on his left arm.  He married quite late in life, initially unwilling to burden a spouse with his painful past.  He purposely never had children, unwilling to bring children into the world where something like the Holocaust was possible.  And although he became a successful businessman, he never fulfilled his dream of studying medicine; he was so weakened by his time in Auschwitz that he felt he could never recover the mental strength to study something as strenuous as Medicine. 

            The testimony of his time in Auschwitz, though obviously not as lengthy as Levi’s, is nonetheless very detailed, horrifyingly so.  He repeats his story with such amazement, that although he lived through the hell of Auschwitz and had years to ponder its significance,  he is still unable to fathom how human beings were and can become capable of wreaking such cruelty on other human beings.  He pulls the reader into his personal shock at how the guards deliberately stripped the humanity and individuality of the inmates as they stripped them of their clothes, shaved the hair off of their entire bodies, made them walk outside, naked and wet, into the Polish winter, woke them up at all hours of the night, then exchanged their names for a tattooed  number, thus introducing them into a life of systematic torture.

            Jabelot’s survival was a combination of youthful determination, lck, and simple human kindness.  It is this basic kindness and respect that he believed were the keys to preventing another Holocaust: “the minute that one no longer respects one’s neighbor, one no longer looks at one’s neighbor as a human being, a worthy, respectable person, that is the beginning of Nazism.” Jabelot’s chief purpose, until he died in 1999, was to communicate this simple but profound message.  His testimony contained in Barnett’s book is a powerful tool towards that end.