Alan Elsner, Guarded by Angels: How My Father and Uncle Survived Hitler and Cheated Stalin, Yad Vashem, 2005, 256 pp; 55 NIS*

“In the past twenty years, countless memoirs by survivors have appeared. This one stands out as one of the best, not only because of the amazing story it tells but also thanks to the vivid writing that grabs the reader’s interest and never lets go,” writes Professor David Cesarani in the foreword to Alan Elsner’s new book, Guarded by Angels. The book tells the dramatic story of Gene and Mark Elsner, and their cousin Henek, three young Jews forced to flee their home in Nowy Sącz (Sanz), in southern Poland in 1939, only to be arrested by Soviet authorities in Lwów and transported to gulags north of the Arctic Circle. Near death from starvation, they were released after 18 months and traversed thousands of miles across the Soviet Union, passing through Central Asia, before finding refuge in a Cossack village in the Caucasus. There they survived six months of Nazi occupation, during which Gene became a translator for the occupying Germans. From this vantage point he witnessed numerous atrocities and was able to contact and actively aid the resistance. Gene and Mark were later drafted by a Polish brigade of the Red Army and participated in the Soviet advance through Poland and into Germany, where Gene was seriously wounded and assumed dead.
The book is written by Gene’s son, who went on to build a distinguished international journalistic career. It offers invaluable insight into life deep within the Soviet Union, as well as the Nazi occupation of the Caucasus. Gene and Mark were saved by their quick-wittedness and resourcefulness, which led to a series of hair-raising escapes. Despite efforts by local authorities to separate them, they succeeded in staying together. Their intense loyalty to each other contributed to their survival, but it also imperilled them repeatedly, one of the terrible ironies of that period.
Guarded by Angels is the second book in a series of memoirs being published jointly by Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project, created with a generous grant from Random House. The first book was Days of Rain, Enzo Tayar’s gripping diary-based memoir on Italy, published last November. With the available funding, it is hoped that a number of memoirs will be published annually over the next few years, with five books (nine memoirs) already scheduled for publication in 2005.
The goal of the series is to collect and preserve the autobiographical accounts of Holocaust survivors, making them available to a broad, English-speaking readership. Elsner’s book is a fine illustration of the essence of this mission, recording not only the amazing odyssey of Gene and Mark Elsner, but also chronicling, in Cesarani’s words, “the process by which memory is transmitted from generation to generation.”

The author is Editor-in-Chief of Yad Vashem Studies

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*special price