On the Run in Nazi Berlin

February 1, 2019
A detailed, horrifying, and ultimately hopeful account of a young Jewish man's efforts to avoid the Nazis in one of their principal cities.Thankfully, Bert Lewyn, who died in 2016, had the good fortune to have family who cared about his remarkable story. Through interviews, travels, and archival research, his son and daughter-in-law, who worked as a researcher at CNN, compiled and edited this account (first self-published in 2001) of his wartime evasions during his teen years. In one of history's darkest periods, the author suffered profoundly--separated from his parents, he never saw them again--and endured unspeakable deprivations. But he also benefitted from some courageous Berliners who hid him, fed him, and gave him hope. Lewyn was a technically skilled young man, proficient at metalworking and other machine skills, and these capacities enabled him not only to find occasional work--including for the Nazis themselves--but to escape from Nazi custody. He stayed with friends or slept in bombed-out buildings or in the countryside. But the Nazis eventually nabbed him, and the author provides a harrowing account of a prison break through an underground tunnel, an escape made possible by his knowledge of locks and keys. In addition to the grief he expresses for the loss of his parents, he tells about his quick marriage to a young mother. It was a marriage that helped them both survive but one that could not endure. The compiler and editor have done their best to enliven the narrative with verbatim dialogue and information derived from their journeys to key sites in Lewyn's story. They write that they have endeavored to verify everything that's still possible to verify, and their extensive backmatter and photographs of places and significant documents testify to their considerable efforts--and to their fidelity.A grim and gripping story of survival in a most egregious time.

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February 11, 2019
This remembrance of a teen’s struggle to survive the Holocaust won’t provide readers familiar with similar memoirs new insights. In 1942, the author and his parents were taken from their Berlin apartment by the Nazis and separated. Lewyn’s experience as an apprentice in machine building and metalworking spared him for a time, as he was put to work in a munitions factory. A chance encounter with a non-Jewish coworker alerted him to the Germans’ decision to send the factory’s Jewish workers to a death camp, allowing Lewyn to escape the roundup. He spent the remainder of WWII dodging capture, aided by the occasional selfless stranger, his own resourcefulness, and lucky breaks—one of which was that he was saved from being shot by liberating Russian forces when one of them, who happened also to be Jewish, believed Lewyn wasn’t a Nazi because he had read a textbook that Lewyn’s Russian uncle had written. The book could be better organized; Saltzman Lewyn, the author’s daughter-in-law, bafflingly places two sections of Lewyn’s reminiscences in appendices, rather than chronologically within the main text. Despite this, this memoir will be informative for those who have not viewed the Nazi extermination of European Jewry from an individual’s perspective.