Fighting Fascism and Surviving Buchenwald

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