Holocaust survivor's story deserves deeper examination

"Breaking the Silence: Reminiscences of a Hidden Child," Paul A. Schwarzbart, Authorhouse, Bloomington, Ind., 2004, soft cover, 144 pages.

SALT LAKE CITY — Paul A. Schwarzbart has an important historical story to tell. Born in Belgium in 1933, he was a tender child when the rise of Nazism began to tear his family apart. Schwarzbart lost his father and other members of his family, but was able to cling to his mother, and through her great courage and sacrifice, he was able to survive the Holocaust. Trusting in a family for whom she worked, Sara Ryfka Schneider Schwarzbart entrusted her only son, Paul, to the care of a Catholic boys school in Jamoigne, Belgium, run by the Sisters of Charity of Besancon. For two years he would live as "just another happy-go-lucky Belgian Catholic kid," by the names of Paul Exsteen.

Sixty years after World War II, as Holocaust survivors age and die, their stories are more poignant and more important. The drama that surrounded Schwarzbart’s early life could be lost, along with thousand like him. It would compound the tragedy that is part of world history.

But Schwarzbart’s story deserves better treatment than it’s gotten here. The book reads as if the author himself hasn’t yet come to grips with what he’s been through. There’s a lack of depth and understanding of the situation and of the sacrifices made by those people who hid these children. Perhaps it is because the hiding children were never revealed to each other as Jewish children in hiding, but only got to know it as adults returning to the school for reunions over the years. Schwarzbart’s childhood memories seem not fully examined in light of the times and his experiences.

Photos in the book are many, but they lack captions, so one can only guess to which part of the text they belong.

The story is important, the telling of it vital, but I would like to see it handled a bit more professionally, perhaps with deeper examination and analysis.

As it is, this book is too much like its cover, a jumble of odd photographs that must have some significance, but we, the reader, don’t get enough information to understand fully their importance. The gem is there, but we can’t see it.