The Worst Game

"Think of this as a game, Jack.  Above all else, do not take personally what is happening to you.  Play the game right and you might outlast the Nazi's."

This is the absolute worst game ever conceived.  Many of us are familiar with the horrors of the Holocaust.  I know I can't even hear or read the word Holocaust without getting a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. But it is a general reaction, I think of the group not the individual.  Andrea Warren shows us the individual in her book Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps.  

This is the true story of Jack, a young boy just 12 years old growing up in Poland.  His parents were Jews but they really only practiced on the high holidays.  In day to day life Jack identified more with his Catholic friends-even singing Christmas Carols with them every year.  But none of that mattered when the Nazi's came.

Warren spent extensive time working with Jack Mandelbaum so the story portrayed here is as true as it can be (Warren's interviews took place nearly 60 years after the fact).  Jack was forced to grow up too fast, becoming the man of his family after they evacuated to the countryside.  He spent the next two years doing labor for the Nazi's.  This time spent working may have saved him-it's the only reason he was sent to a work camp and not a death camp.  But he was sent there alone, his mom and younger brother were sent elsewhere.

Can you even imagine the fear that would permeate every second of your day?  I know when I think of the Holocaust I often think of adult men who were liberated only after they had been worked and starved almost to the point of death.  Or I think of the mass graves and the gas chambers.  I rarely think of the children who had to endure. Not anymore.  Now I will think of the children.

This book is heavy and it is devastating and it makes you weep to think that human beings treated each other in this way.  But it's the kind of book that should be required reading.  Because we must never forget.

Winning the game...that's kids stuff