Jud Allen. Life Without a Safety Net: An Insider’s View of War, Hollywood, and Reno. Marceline, Missouri: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997; 242 pp. Available in local bookstores.

Book reviews are meant to whet your appetite and not to serve the full menu. To speak about Jud Allen’s book, I can do just that - whet your appetite so that you may read the rest and judge for yourself. Jud Allen made many ‘stops’ along the way before he finally settled in this "Biggest Little City" as the Reno Chamber manager in 1959. Since his arrival, most people know and have appreciated him for his humor, his sensitivity, his kindness, his ability to ‘move mountains’ in order to get things done, and his integrity. The list of entertainers, movie stars and ‘celebs’ Jud brought to this town or came in contact with is endless and reads like a veritable ‘who’s who’. At a time when people of color were allowed to perform in casinos but were excluded from being guests in hotels, Jud Allen fought to overcome prejudice by pointing out bigotry even at the cost of becoming unpopular with some casino owners. At the bottom of such integrity is an experience which Jud Allen relates at the beginning of his book. He was then a young soldier of 28 in the heart of Europe. In 1945 - as a member of the First Army Press Camp - Allen was to lead some American correspondents to the concentration camp of Buchenwald which has been liberated the night before.

To experience the power of his testimony, I feel we should let Jud Allen’s words speak for themselves: "When I woke up on the morning of April 7, 1945, I had no idea that by nightfall I would no longer be the same person. Although I had only slept a few hours in a small hotel in Weimar, Germany, my energy level was unusually high. I felt comfortable that I had survived the war, and unlike many of my lost companions, it would be my good fortune to return in one piece and enjoy a full life. [...] This morning I would drive two correspondents to a concentration camp named Buchenwald. It had been liberated by our soldiers during the night, and the writers wanted to see it before it was cleaned up. [...] It was a perfect spring morning and I found the German forest to be breathtakingly beautiful. How could I possibly prepare myself for anything negative in such a setting?

We finally arrived at an opening in the forest. In the center was a stockade that looked like something out of a John Wayne western. The front gate was open and a sign above it read, "Our Fatherland, Right or Wrong."

Following that moment I went through a total transformation. As we entered this gate to hell, I experienced all my senses being invaded with a horror I never thought possible. I looked down at large pits filled with naked corpses. I smelled the stench of rotting flesh. From the near-by barracks I heard humans moaning - the sick and dying. To have this infiltrate all my senses simultaneously completely shattered any past concepts I had of civilized behavior. [...] What I witnessed was a slaughterhouse substituting humans for cattle. As I sat frozen in this pool of inhumanity, a sense of guilt invaded me. Was I or were any of my fellow Americans really the ‘innocents abroad’, or should we accept responsibility? While our prejudice took a more passive form, hadn’t our country also been a breeding ground for bigotry?

I wondered what would have happened if I had been born and raised in Nazi Germany. Would I have had the strength and the conviction to resist the government, or would I have gone along with the evil leadership? For the first time I was forced to question myself. In turn, I had never felt so alone. I realized the ultimate loneliness is to be a stranger to yourself.

The three of us drove back to Weimar in silence. The moment I arrived back in my room, I went to my typewriter and attempted to explain this experience to my parents. After many tries I found it impossible to transform what I had seen into words with similar impact. I accepted that from now on I would basically know two kinds of people: those who were there and those who weren’t.

In the video documentary Memories of the Holocaust (1995), co-produced by KNPB-Reno and the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies, Jud Allen expresses this sense of loss, of horror, loneliness and alienation: "Buchenwald became a symbol of my own shortcomings" and a powerful catalyst for his compassion in the years to come. As members of the community, we all came to benefit from Jud Allen’s humanity.

Viktoria Hertling