Fighting Fascism and Surviving Buchenwald

Book excerpt: Bension Varon has given the world two great gifts: the publication for the first time of the remarkable 1946 Buchenwald memoir of Hans Bergas and a riveting account of Bergas' equally remarkable life. Bergas, a highly secular German Jew, was first known to Bension Varon as the brother-in-law of his wife's uncle. Far transcending genealogical interest, Varon's painstaking research has revealed the many identities of Hans Bergas: an impassioned Social Democrat, who battled both fascist and communist threats to Germany's fledgling, interwar democracy; a member of the anti-Nazi Resistance in France, who aided other escapees of the Nazi regime; a victim of capture and savage torture by the Gestapo; a years-long "political" inmate in Buchenwald, active in the camp resistance; and a gifted chronicler of life in Buchenwald and the detail of Nazi depravity. In this volume, Bergas emerges like a lost treasure from history's attic, precious both in itself and for what it reveals about its troubled times.