DOCTOR 117641: A Holocaust Memoir

A personal narrative of harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. Micheels begins his recollections with a beautiful day in 1940. He is enjoying the mild warm air and blue sky of a Dutch spring. He pays little attention to the noise of planes and antiaircraft guns, because he is studious, and also because he is young, confident, and full of hope. It is this hope--that somehow things will work out, that there will be a way to get on--that supports him step by step as first the Nazis invade the Netherlands, and then begin to impose their policies, up until the nightmare horrors of Auschwitz and the death-march to Dachau. All during this terrible ordeal, he is sustained by his continuing affection for his fianc‚e, also an inmate, and by his sympathetic interest in his fellow prisoners and even in his tormentors, to whom he is bound not only as victim, but also as helper because of his medical knowledge. He movingly describes and analyzes the conflicts he now feels as a ""secret-sharer"": the need to keep silent, and the desire to tell all. And here he finally and courageously unburdens himself of the heavy load he has been bearing. A moving testament to the sustaining power of hope, love, and will, even in the face of the most horrendous evil.