cover image Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir

Doctor #117641: A Holocaust Memoir

Louis Micheels. Yale University Press, $22 (199pp) ISBN 978-0-300-04398-3

A Dutch-born Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz, and now a psychiatry professor at Yale's School of Medicine, Micheels here writes a conventional Holocaust autobiography. The viciousness of the Nazis, their humiliation of prisoners and the paradoxical cruelties and kindnesses paid by camp inmates to each other--all are familiar, if harrowing themes, in such memoirs. But the love story Micheels chronicles sets his book apart: both captured and imprisoned together, the author and his fiancee endured heroic struggles. And yet, when reunited in Holland after the war, they found themselves altered so radically by wartime trauma that marriage was unthinkable. Jewish Book Club alternate. (Apr.)