From soul to psyche
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A Jew of German origin, David Matzner writes with astonishing recall of his five years in 20 prisons, slave labor and concentration camps in France, Poland and Germany. Matzner's description of his experiences at Auschwitz and elsewhere, in a world surfeited with horror and eager for hope, still has the power to move the reader.
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On line for the infamous selekzia, he rushes up the line to greet a prisoner whom he mistakenly takes for his brother - with the result that his new part of the line is spared. If he had not run up to greet the man he thought was his brother, he would have gone to the gas chambers. The very night on which he had a vivid dream of his aged father reciting the Kiddush and wishing him "lechayyim," he discovered after the war, was the day his father was deported.
Still later, he discovered that his surviving brother had had the same dream the very same night. At one of the camps at which he spent time as a Schreiber, a clerk, was the Satmar Rebbe, whose barrack, in which were housed 240 of his followers, refused all non-kosher food, and subsisted on a diet of bread, potatoes and onions with boiled water. The barrack became a place of worship, learning and study, in part thanks to Matzner.
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