avg_rating: 4.13
name: Pierre Berg
about: In 1947, at my first job in California, a coworker inquired about the tattoo on my left arm. "It was my license plate in a Nazi concentration camp. I lost half of my weight there. From 145 lbs to 72 lbs.""We had a rough time, too, here in the U.S. She said. We had to eat chicken all the time."Thinking that someday I might forget what I went through in those 18 months, I wrote down my odyssey. I was twenty-one years old. Those recollections sat in a drawer for over fifty years. The title of my memoir is Scheisshaus Luck because it was shithouse luck that I survived.I escaped a selection to Birkenau's gas chambers because I did a good job washing my blockelster's shirts. I fell asleep in a warehouse and was written up for an escape attempt, b In 1947, at my first job in California, a coworker inquired about the tattoo on my left arm. "It was my license plate in a Nazi concentration camp. I lost half of my weight there. From 145 lbs to 72 lbs.""We had a rough time, too, here in the U.S. She said. We had to eat chicken all the time."Thinking that someday I might forget what I went through in those 18 months, I wrote down my odyssey. I was twenty-one years old. Those recollections sat in a drawer for over fifty years. The title of my memoir is Scheisshaus Luck because it was shithouse luck that I survived.I escaped a selection to Birkenau's gas chambers because I did a good job washing my blockelster's shirts. I fell asleep in a warehouse and was written up for an escape attempt, but because the man who tattooed me had a shaking hand, they mistook the 9 for a 3 and another poor soul was hung in my place. I turned 19 in Auschwitz. I carried the body of a Jehovah Witness out of the camp's brothel. She had committed suicide because she couldn't be anyone's whore. I helped deliver the ashes of 900 human beings to women toiling in a cabbage patch. From the looks of the heads of cabbage we made good fertilizer. I barely survived the death march out of Auschwitz, then found myself working on circuit boards for the V2 rockets in Dora. When I could, I gave those boards hell.I fell in love with a girl in the Paris camp of Drancy before we were shipped to Pitchi Poi. In Auschwitz I dreamed of reuniting with her, but I had no fairy tale ending.I am a gentile. I want the skinheads, the neo-Nazis, the Holocaust deniers to come to me and say that the Holocaust is just Jewish propaganda. I want to help put a cork in the bile they spew. ...more