Himmler's Jewish Tailor: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Jacob Frank

Born in 1913 and raised in Lublin, Poland, Frank survived over five years of forced labor and genocidal imprisonment in Nazi camps between 1939 and 1945. For a while he was put in charge of a camp's clothing factory, where he supervised the making of special leather coats for the Nazi elite, including Himmler and Eichmann (""the whole look was meant to terrorize you""). Novelist Lewis (Suspicions Among the Thoughts I May Contain) has crafted Frank's first-person account of his life from ""two months of interviews and meetings,"" and from the cassettes and videotapes Frank recorded in the 1980s for Yale's Holocaust archive. Lewis and Frank's oral history method, with its hesitations, digressions and questions, seems designed to preserve Frank's idiom and his detailed process of recollection: readers can imagine the man himself speaking as he describes his slow, complicated years of persecution and horror. Frank witnessed the destruction of Lublin's Jewish ghetto: he may be (coauthor Lewis declares) ""the only person to have survived the entire existence of the labor camp"" called Lipowa, built inside Lublin and linked to the Majdanek death camp. Frank was later held at a camp in France, and then at Dachau. Frank's memoir stands out among Holocaust testimonies for the rarity of his experiences: Holocaust historians will want and need to know what he remembers about Lublin, Lipowa and other sites of labor and terror. Lewis's admirable introduction explains his methods, gives background and context for Frank's story and makes clear that he hopes for readers from both the community of scholars and the wider, nonacademic world: this meticulous record surely merits them. 11 photos; two maps. Agent, Barbara Brown. (Feb.)