Bread, Butter, and Sugar

Based on the true story of Martin Schiller, a child survivor of the Holocaust, this gripping memoir describes the unfolding horror of the Nazi genocide seen through the eyes of a child. "Menek" (Schiller's childhood nickname) was six-years-old when the Nazis invaded Poland, and his family fled eastward from their native Tarnobrzeg. He was nine when he and his family were interned as slave laborers at the Skarzysko concentration camp, where his father perished. As the Russian army advanced, Menek and his brother were deported to Buchenwald, where Menek survived with the help of a sympathetic Block Elder (a German political prisoner) who placed him in a barrack for Russian POWs. The story of his journey continues after liberation, with their harrowing escape from postwar Poland; the brothers' travels through war-ravaged Germany to find their mother; and the anxiety of the DP camps where the family must decide between Israel or America. This memoir covers the now-emblematic features of a survivor's journey both during and after the war with the intimacy of a young boy's point-of-view, recalling his own thoughts and reactions to events as he tries to make sense of an irrational world.

This powerful memoir—spanning a young boy's journey into manhood from prewar Poland to the horrors of the Nazi camps, and then to the surreal drama of life in the post DP camps, rings with emotional honesty. It provides a valuable addition to our understanding of both those who perished and survived the Holocaust., This is a short and matter-of-fact book and yet it tells a gripping story—among the last such stories that will be told from direct experience, since the last of the survivors of the Holocaust are dying off. Even readers familiar with these stories may thank Schiller for telling this one in time., Martin Schiller has told us the story of what should have been his childhood spent together with his brother in slave labor and concentration camps and the struggle for survival—day in and day out— that enabled four members of his family to survive. His depiction of the last days of Buchenwald is riveting. One glimpses what it was like to be there. The brevity of the work only underscores its power. Like music, one must understand the silence between the words that give voice to the unspoken. With Bread, Butter, and Sugar, he has discharged his obligation to the past and made an important contribution to the future.

Martin Schiller is an electrical engineer specializing in air pollution control. Arriving in the United States in 1946, he served in the U.S. Navy and earned his engineering degree from the University of New Haven. He lives with his wife in Fairfield, Connecticut.