Jagendorf's Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust, 1941-1944 FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In the early 1940s Romania exiled 150,000 Jews to Transnistria, a war-devastated corner of the Nazi-occupied Soviet Ukraine. There Jagendorf, a failed Jewish entrepreneur, convinced the Nazis to let him convert a abandoned spare-parts factory into a Jewish labor colony. Outmaneuvering Romanian officials, he saved some 15,000 Jews from extermination. To many critics the resourceful engineer was a collaborator who usurped power to preserve his own life. This extraordinary document consists of Jagendorf's first-person narrative intertwined with commentary by Hirt-Manheimer, editor-in-chief of the Holocaust Library, who spent two years interviewing survivors and analyzing primary sources. Amplifying Jagendorf's self-portrayal as a stern but sympathetic paragon of virtue, Hirt-Manheimer points out flagrant abuses of power by Jagendorf's ghetto police. Yet the picture that emerges from this riveting, heartrending story is of a genuine hero who helped thousands survive by dint of his courage, wits and luck. (Apr.)
Library Journal
Holocaust literature seems to increase by thousands of volumes each year. However, little has been written on the Romanian Holocaust, which makes this particular memoir valuable. With the aid of a team of other Jews, Jagendorf, an engineer, helped save thousands in a forgotten ironworks foundry. Edited by the editor-in-chief of the Holocaust Library, Jagendorf's memoir (he died some 25 years ago) is both a human story as well as a history of the German-occupied Soviet territory of Moghilev and the peculiar circumstances of the Romanian situation. There is a two-page list of sources for further consideration. See also Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel's Children of the Flames , reviewed in this issue, p. 101.--Ed.-- Jehuda Reinharz, Brandeis Univ., Waltham, Mass.
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