Journey through the night - A Holocaust memoir (Hardcover)

In 1948 a Holocaust memoir was published in German under the title Notes from a Bunker and under the authorship of Jakob Littner. In 1991 the book was republished as Jakob Littner's Notes from a Bunker, authored by Wolfgang Koeppen, a noted postwar German novelist, who died in 1996. The dust jacket of the new edition bore the rubric "A Novel, " and in his brief preface Koeppen explained: "The man who had escaped was looking for a writer....The publisher asked me: 'Do you want to write it?' This human being who had been so abused wanted to get away. He emigrated to America. He promised me an honorarium -- two care packages each month. I ate American rations and wrote the story about the suffering of a German Jew. In doing so, it became my story."

"My story"? Critics have wondered about that. Is the book fictional at all? And if so, how much? As it turns out, Koeppen worked from a fully completed typescript written by one Jakob Littner who did indeed experience the horrific events described in the "novel" and emigrated to America, where he died in 1950. This is his own true story, with additional family and historical material provided by a younger relative. Littner's story is unusual because it takes place not in a concentration camp, but in a town in Ukraine on the Eastern front. Littner's memoir traces his life from Munich, where he was a highly successful stamp dealer, to the ghetto of Zbaraz in Ukraine. In spare but harrowing prose, it describes the destruction of the Jews of Zbaraz and Littner's almost miraculous survival through chance and resourcefulness, and the remarkable actions of Christa, a beautiful German woman who had been his business partner in Munich. One element thatis sure to spark controversy is the active role of the Jewish Council and Jewish Militia in the killing of the Jews of Zbaraz.