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2003 · ref. 82105 — Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company 2003. First Printing Stated. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxii 2 311 1 pages. Includes Preface Afterword Illustrations Notes Bibliography Glossary Acknowledgments and Index. Chapters cover Nichts Juden. Juden Kapputt; The Hospital and the Berlin Jews; The Beginning of the End 1938-41; The Nazis' Intermarriage Quandary; The Deportations; The Assault on the Gemeinde and the Hospital 194243; Making a Life for Oneself in the Hospital; The Factory Raid and the Frauenprotest; The Continued Assault on the Hospital; Prisoners and survivors; The Work of the Reichsvereinigung and the Hospital 1942-45; The Twilight of the Nazis; and The Trial of Dr. Dr. Lustig and Other Questions. The author a lawyer and former General Counsel at the CIA provides a close-up look at the little-known story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital the only Jewish institution in Germany to survive the Holocaust drawing on the accounts of survivors to describe daily life in the hospital under the Nazis the machinations of hospital director Dr. Lustig the medical staff and patients and the hospital's liberation by Soviet troops in 1945. When Nazism was finally destroyed and Berlin liberated in April 1945 the only surviving Jewish institution was a smallish hospital which also served as a prison and housed a Gestapo branch office. In an amazing feat of research Daniel Silver has reconstructed this story of heroism and cowardice of loyalty and betrayal and retraced the fate of the individual survivors. It is a judicious and eminently readable account and a notable contribution to the last days of the last remnant of German Jewry. This compassionate study of the working of a Jewish institution in the grip of the Gestapo is told from the inside through unpublished memoirs and stories rescued by oral history. Like Victor Klemperer's diaries it lends three dimensions to the lives of Nazism's victims and presents a variety of personalities in breathtaking accounts of daily risk intrigue and survival. In 1945 when the Red Army liberated Berlin they found in the Nazi capital a functioning Jewish hospital. In Refuge in Hell Daniel B. Silver explores the many quirks of fortune and history that made the hospital's survival possible. His engrossing account of this little-known slice of history "reads like a novel imbued with the richness of a strong narrative and the depth of compelling characters" Forward. Not since Schindler's List has there been such a wrenching story of personal sacrifice and triumph. Silver's narrative centers on the intricate machinations of the hospital's director Dr. Lustig a German-born Jew who managed to keep the Gestapo at bay throughout the war in part because of his power over his staff and patients and his finely honed relationship with the infamous Adolf Eichmann. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Silver tells the astonishing story of Berlin's Jewish Hospital during WWII. For decades before the Nazis seized power in Germany the hospital had served Berlin's Jews as their principal medical resource. At the war's end it was still functioning delivering what medical care it could and sheltering a large percentage of the city's few remaining Jews. Silver asks how a Jewish institution located in the capital city of a regime dedicated above all to obliterating the Jews could possibly have survived. To answer this question Silver has gathered the available documentary evidence and interviewed the handful of hospital staffers still alive. According to these sources the institution's survival hinged on an amalgam of factors including sheer blind luck and bureaucratic infighting among Nazi organizations. As Silver explains the Nazis' bizarre system for classifying persons of partly Jewish ancestry played a role as well since some hospital personnel with mixed ancestry were not treated with the same implacable hostility as full Jews were. Silver acknowledges where gaps in the evidence make certainty impossible as in assessing Dr. Walter Lustig the hospital's chief during the war years. Lustig may have been a betrayer and collaborator as some staffers think or he may have manipulated the system as best he could to save at least some Jews from destruction. The balanced analysis of Dr. Lustig's record typifies the author's careful use of evidence throughout this absorbing book. Houghton Mifflin Company hardcover