The Apprentice of Buchenwald, by Oren Schneider

An astounding story of courage, hope and profound love, written by a grandson for his grandfather. The author, Oren Schneider, was raised in Israel by his grandfather Alexander Ru?iak, after his father, a combat pilot, died in a plane collision. This is the story of Alexander’s remarkable survival during the Holocaust, and Schneider’s attempts to come to terms with its magnitude.

The narrative is broken into two parts: the Holocaust and its aftermath. The first part of the journey begins when Alexander Rosenberg is born as the only son of an upper class Jewish family in the 1930s. His family lived in a small town of Se?ovce in Czechoslovakia, where his father, Stefan, ran a successful department store. The Rosenbergs were part of the elite society of Czechoslovakia, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful. Alexander’s early childhood was peaceful, happy and luxurious. It was a golden age.

The brutal persecution of the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia was not anticipated by the family. They watched in mounting horror as the violence crept closer to their country and their home. As Nazi ideology trickled its way across Europe, they witnessed the rise of the far-right group Hlinkova Garda, which acted as the prime tormentors of the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia. Over the course of 6 years, the Rosenbergs lost their business, their homes, their belongings and their freedom. They change their name to Ru?iak to avoid attention. At age 17, Alexander is deported in abominable conditions to Sachsenhausen and then Buchenwald. His father is with him; his mother separated from them.

The Apprentice of Buchenwald.The True Story of the Teenage Boy Who Sabotaged Hitler’s War Machine, is a tale of unrelenting courage in the face of societal corruption. The family is betrayed on multiple occasions by those they once considered their friends. Schneider writes the memoir to honour his grandfather’s legacy but he emphasizes the wide-spread apathy that was partly responsible for the Holocaust. He writes, “During the war, at times, humans lost their humanity.”

Both father and son were forced to work in an arms factory within Buchenwald. The care and attention they give to each other are breathtaking in their dimensions. At various points throughout their imprisonment, father and son save each other, again and again. When they are first transferred to the Buchenwald sub-camp, the only way they can survive in the freezing conditions on the snowy yard is to sleep in shifts, keeping the other one warm by rubbing the sleeping person’s skin, using a wooden plate to keep their bodies off the snow. When Stefan is selected in a small group to move to another, less arduous labour camp, he convinces his son to join him without permission. Alexander is violently beaten by the SS, and only saved by his father when he begs the benevolent factory owner to intervene. When Stefan is weak and injured, it is his son who nurses him back to a semblance of health, with patience, diligence, and contraband confectionery.

While in the Buchenwald plant, Alexander joins the underground resistance movement. He starts off as a message carrier between the Russian prisoners of war, to help sabotage the arms being made, primarily Hauser rifles. The enigmatic Grischa, a senior commander of the Red Army and prisoner of Buchenwald, leads the effort and decides what sabotage should take place. There is suddenly a great moral dilemma the teenager’s shoulders: should he help the good fight and join the efforts, or keep his head down, look after his father, and ensure their survival? His father makes the choice for him, as he quietly yet proudly encourages the boy to work against their captors. Moral decency is upheld, even in the most difficult, dreadful circumstances.

The sabotage carried out is truly ingenious. It is a delicate undertaking - too much sabotage and you will be find out and shot, too little and your clandestine efforts will mean nothing. The author takes us through the varied means of subversion the men undertook: heating metal pins in the furnace so that they lose their durability, widening?the seats of screws so they fall out after a few jostles, cutting in half the amount of metal used in soldering the rifle’s sight so that the barrel becomes loose with use. Each endeavor results in the weapons losing their function while in action, but not when undergoing the obligatory testing phase. The labour camp thus produced thousands of malfunctioning, shoddy rifles for the Wehrmacht, with no one in management or the military being any the wiser.

The Apprentice of Buchenwald is a moving chronicle that explores the notion that an individual can be complicit in crimes and on the wrong side of history, and yet still show charity and kindness. As nightshift manager, Alexander’s father is deemed responsible by the SS for an escape attempt of men on his shift. Alexander saves him by appealing to the civilian boss, Günter, of the munitions factory, and his father is saved when the two uncover evidence of his innocence on the factory floor. Günter reveals himself to be generous and loyal to the father-son duo, letting the two take time off their shifts to reunite. The polarity is eloquently summed up in Alexander’s reflection: “Undoubtedly, he was playing for Satan’s team, but I now knew for a fact that there were angels down in hell.”

A fundamental instrument to Alexander’s survival is purest luck. Schneider details how his grandfather experienced multiple life-saving miracles, one after the other. One?when he survives the deadly Allied air raids on the plant. Another when he is taken out of his subsequent arduous bomb squad duties to clean and reequip the Mercedes typewriters destroyed in the air raid. A third when he discovers a stash of Nestle chocolate bars in his workshop, and uses the chocolate to bribe the resident Kapo to have his father transferred out of the injured camp, where the two are reunited. Schneider’s characters explicitly debate this element of chance and fate on a calm day after the war, with Stefan stating: “I guess it’s the luck of the draw […] We fought to survive. We sincerely wanted to live. Luck gave us opportunities to fight.”

Schneider’s narrative is revelatory in its focus on the often forgotten details of the camp experience. With liberation came an abundance of food from the American occupiers, as they try to save the lives of the camp inmates. But this abrupt increase in caloric intake and change in type of nutrition does more harm than good in the first nights at the camp, as prisoners die when their bodies are unable to process the food. Then, a shocking revelation comes in the form of a throw away comment made by an American doctor in the camp. The watery, insubstantial soup the prisoners had been fed had been laced with bromide, poisoning the emaciated prisoners and affecting their mental state.

Both father and son survive Buchenwald, and return to their hometown. They manage to make their way to a relative’s house and find Alexander’s mother, weak and unwell but alive, having survived the camps herself. The gleeful reunion is soon overshadowed by the question of how to survive in the post-war landscape, with no money, no job or connections. While his parents find some retail work in their home country, Alexander meets his future wife Judith and decides to join her in the fight to defend the newly founded Israel. Their old home is gone; they have been persecuted and chased out of it, and so they go in search of their new one.

The second part to this heroic story comes 40 years after the Germans surrendered, when a young Oren Schneider takes a high-school trip to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Schneider is deeply moved, and feels profound rage at the horrors endured in the camps, at the indiscriminate torture and murder. When he returns to his grandfather, Alexander agrees to take him back to Europe to see his old hometown and the Buchenwald camp. The trip is an emotive one, and Schneider uses the narrative to masterfully contrast the immediacy of the daily life in the camp with the abrupt, jarring distance of half a century: the buildings are no longer standing, the surroundings are different, the place is empty. The horrors seem distant. Yet, it is in this Europe of painful memories that Alexander finds himself again, as he used to be: the boy who collected stamps, played music for his mother and adored his father.

Finally, in 2020 in Brooklyn, New York, just as the Covid-19 pandemic is sweeping across the world, Schneider hears the news that his grandfather has passed away. While the story may end on a note of profound sadness, Schneider’s final portrait of his grandfather, his hero, in his later years is a beautiful one. We see Alexander as he was meant to be: a happy, successful and vigorous business man. A grandpa who put family before all else, who raised his grandson himself and who adopted a life philosophy of positive thinking and self-reliance. The Apprentice of Buchenwald is a moving, dazzling dedication to Alexander’s life in all its stages, and is not a story you will easily forget.

The Apprentice of Buchenwald. The True Story of the Teenage Boy Who Sabotaged Hitler’s War Machine, by Oren Schneider, Amsterdam Publishers, https://mybook.to/Rn7ABV 232 pp, is available as ebook, paperback and hardcover in all bookstores, on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.