Volume 39, Number 17 · October 22, 1992
Witnesses to Evil
By István Deák
In the Lion's Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen
by Nechama Tec
Oxford University Press, 279 pp., $21.95
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945
by Raul Hilberg
HarperCollins/Aaron Asher Books, 340 pp., $25.00
A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis
edited by Michael Berenbaum
New York University Press, 244 pp., $17.50 (paper)
Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust
edited by Richard C. Lukas
The University Press of Kentucky, 201 pp., $25.00
Of the thousands of Jews who survived the Holocaust by disguising themselves as gentiles, Oswald Rufeisen, the subject of In the Lion's Den, may have been the most resourceful. I first heard of him in the early 1960s, when the Israeli Supreme Court debated the request of Father Daniel, a Carmelite monk at the Stella Maris monastery on Mount Carmel in Haifa, to be given Israeli citizenship on the basis of the Law of Return. If this were granted, Father Daniel—formerly Oswald Rufeisen—would be identified in his Israeli passport as a Jew. One of the five judges was in favor of accepting Father Daniel's claim, but the others turned him down, arguing that 'a Jew who changed his religion cannot be counted as a Jew in the sense and the spirit that the Knesset (Parliament) meant in the Law of Return and as it is accepted among our people today.'
Review, 4392 words
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