The Dentist of Auschwitz

November 28, 1994
Jacobs, a Polish Jew, was a first-year dental student before he spent five years in Nazi extermination camps, including Auschwitz. Here, he vividly recalls that time, during which his elementary professional skills enabled him to practice primitive dentistry on inmates and SS officers alike, as well as to obey orders to extract gold teeth from corpses after gassing. Jacobs's understated tone conveys all the more forcefully the daily horror of camp life: bitter cold, near starvation, the smell of burning human flesh. Worst of all, notes the author, born Berek Jakubowicz, Auschwitz became a perverted ``way of life'' as he tried to survive it. Jacobs, who now practices dentistry in Boston, is a compelling witness. Illustrations not seen by PW.

October 1, 1994
Benjamin Jacobs was a Jewish dental student who in 1941 was deported from the Polish village of Dobra--along with 166 other Jewish men, including his father--to a Nazi labor camp. Jacobs was 22, and what followed was four years of horror in two labor camps and in Auschwitz, where his father died and his brother survived. (His mother and sister were murdered in Chelmno.) The author survived because of his elementary dental skills; he worked on the teeth of inmates and later on those of 55 officers. In simple, straightforward prose, Jacobs reveals the relentless and senseless brutality of concentration camp existence and--finally--the miracle of survival. Jacobs' book is another solid addition to the ever-growing body of Holocaust literature. ((Reviewed October 1, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)