Volume 26, Number 6 · April 19, 1979
No Surrender
By Rosemary Dinnage
Surviving and Other Essays
by Bruno Bettelheim
Knopf, 448 pp., $15.00
It is a formidable task, being a survivor. The new lease of life is not given on the same terms as the old one. Bruno Bettelheim quotes a letter written to him by a half-Jewish woman who survived the Nazi occupation of Holland hidden in a Gentile family: 'Again and again I have asked myself, 'Why was I saved?' ' A friend who had been a Resistance worker told her, 'So that you prove for the rest of your life that it was worth being saved'; quite a burden to carry. And the survivor, the memento mori, can be an inconvenience: when Bettelheim came to the US in 1939 and tried to communicate his experiences inside the Nazi camps he was treated as unbalanced and paranoid, and his paper on the subject—later incorporated into The Informed Heart—turned down by one journal after another.
Review, 1922 words
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