Click Here To Purchase Scheisshaus Luck : Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

Author: Pierre Berg with Brian Brock

Publisher: AMACOM (American Management Association)

ISBN 13: 978-0-8144-1299-2

ISBN 10: 0-8144-1299-8

Back in November 1943 a young Pierre Berg was arrested by the Nazis and later held prisoner in four different concentration camps.

Much later on in Berg’s horrific journey he managed to escape from the last camp in Ravensbruck in May 1945 and eventually returned home to Nice. Once he finished his degree in philosophy and emigrated with his parents to the United States, Berg decided to write a memoir of his Holocaust experience. He titled these experiences, Odyssey of a Pajama. 

This was written in French and although it looked promising he received two rejection letters for his manuscript and banished his recollections to the back of his mind.

However after many, many years a publisher asked to see his work and was keen to get it in print. Because it was such a short memoir it was thought it would read better as a longer piece of work and so we have Schsisshaus Luck. A true testament to the Holocaust literature and an eye-opener to what really went on in Auschwitz and Dora.  

I think this literature takes a different angle to the others that are based on the Holocaust. For a start young Berg was not a Jew but was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is strange how fate can change one person’s destiny and unfortunate that Berg’s own luck changed considerably as he found himself in the ruthless hands of the Germans.

This was a terrible time for Berg not only because he was about to witness many unspeakable horrors but also because he was now alone and separated from his sweetheart - a red-haired beauty named Stella.  Through all his time in Auschwitz Berg would find himself wondering if she was still alive or had been gassed or maybe died of some illness that was killing prisoners off like flies. 

The more I read, the more shocked I was. The Germans, who were heartless to the poor prisoners, had not even enough respect for the dead. Poor Berg describes how he was an eye witness to the mindless treatment of a young dead girl who was carted off to be used as a “flour sack”. Basically, bait in order to catch fish. It begs the question was there no depths to which these beasts would stoop? They mindlessly shot young men and the smell of charred flesh sometimes hung in the atmosphere over camp.

To read this absorbing, powerful account was both a page-turner and very poignant.

If you read the chapter in which Berg’s hope for Stella’s survival is renewed, you will understand. He describes how he finds a corpse covered in rat bites and although it is so disfigured with all these bites and gashes to her flesh, Berg feels sure it is his young sweetheart. The only way to tell for sure is if he opens her eyes to see if they are Stella’s. What he finds inside made me feel quite sick. 

You have to have guts of steel not to be moved by such a gripping and unique personal account. This is a harrowing book and a sufficient addition to the Holocaust publications. I’d recommend this to everyone because I feel maybe we should all learn about what went on and the unspeakable slaughter that was in Auschwitz. A survival book at its best with heartache and above all, yep, luck.