Gizel Berman, My Three Lives. A Story of Love, War and Survival. Seattle: Niche Press, 1999. 165 pp. Paperback. ISBN 0-940675-80-3.

Seattle artist Gizel Berman is a Holocaust survivor. In her book My Three Lives. A Story of Love, War and Survival she writes about her experiences as a child, as a young woman, who was happy and confident until the Nazis come in to destroy her world, and as a survivor. Reading about the three stages of her life — childhood and innocence, young womanhood and the joy of love, imprisonment and survival in Auschwitz — the reader comes face-to-face with the horrors of Nazi persecution.
Born in Sobrance (Czechoslovakia) a year after World War I was over, Gizel enjoyed a happy childhood with her family in a world that felt safe, even after the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Her affluent family was a large one, her father a successful businessman.

Gizel’s life changed when Hungary took over the district her family was living in (note: after the Munich Pact of 1938, Hungary occupied portions of the Karpatho Ukraine—formerly belonging to Czechoslovakia). “The Hungarian regime was anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist, and life for us Jews became a kind of foretaste of what we could endure later under the Germans.” (p. 33) While the Nazis gained more and more power in Germany, and the war had already started, they “lived in two mental worlds at once, dreading the doom that hung over us, yet living as if a whole normal life lay ahead.” (p. 51) Many people simply did not believe that Hitler could possibly intend to annihilate European Jewry.

In 1941 Gizel married a young Jewish dentist. She and Nick enjoyed their honeymoon in Budapest; but at this point, they were already finding it necessary to bribe people in important positions in order to keep Nick away from the front in the East. Despite what the Nazis had in mind for Jews, there was still room for them to lead a somewhat “normal” life. Persecution set in gradually and changed their lives completely.

More and more Nazi organizations came to Hungary, which, by then, was only a puppet of the Third Reich. By 1943, Jews in Hungary were required to wear the yellow Star of David. In May of 1944, a year before the war was over, Gizel and her relatives were rounded up and taken to a ghetto in Uzhorod. Gizel then realized that life as she knew it was over: “Our arrival in the ghetto was my Hiroshima, an event that plunged me into a nightmare and cut me off from the past.” (p. 56) The horrors she experienced that year changed Gizel forever. Nick, Gizel, and her family were deported to Auschwitz and separated. Gizel was never again to see her mother, sister-in-law, or baby niece. Only the hope of being reunited with Nick kept her alive in Auschwitz and, later, Stutthof, the second camp to which she was transferred.

As the war wound down, and the Soviet Army was closing in from the East, the SS forced the camp prisoners to follow the retreating German troops. The long march was a death sentence: “One morning after about three weeks of marching, my feet became too swollen for me to walk. Hard as my spirit might will it, there was nothing I could do. I realized that I had reached my last morning and did what everyone had done before me, hobbling out of line and standing by the roadside, waiting to be shot.” (p. 82) That the mayor of the next village arrived on a horse-drawn wagon at that moment to save the prisoners was a miracle. A Nazi himself, he saved their lives—most likely to save his own. Separated in Auschwitz, Gizel found her husband sick but alive after the war was over.

Back in her hometown of Uzhorod, the Communist government targeted them as members of the bourgeoisie. The war was over, but for Jews the threat of persecution was still there. Anti-semitism did not disappear after the war. As Jews returned to their hometowns or searched elsewhere for surviving relatives and friends, sometimes they were either made to feel unwelcome or, worse still, met with hostility.

In 1946 Gizel and Nick decided to make a new life in America. With the help of an American friend they managed to get the papers necessary for immigration. Nick went to dentistry school, so he could resume his career. Gizel gave birth to their daughter, Margaret, and held various jobs before she discovered that she could bring her beloved, but lost, family and friends back to life by giving them form. Her sculptures speak for those who were silenced and murdered.

My Three Lives is an impressive affirmation that even the worst destruction and hatred may not be able to destroy a person’s faith in life: “I loved people. That was my secret, [...] Despite everything, I remained open to life, with a deep, underlying sense of trust in the worth of existence and of humanity.” (p. 134)

Andreas Feuerstein
Austrian Gedenkdienst Intern