After Auschwitz: One Man's Story, as Told to Brian Demchinsky.

Ian A. Andrews is a high-school social sciences teacher and editor of the New Brunswick Teachers’ Association’s Focus.

What makes Hermann Gruenwald’s memoirs different from other stories of Holocaust survivors is evidenced in the title: After Auschwitz. Years spent in Nazi concentration and extermination camps served as the prelude for both a successful business career and familial fulfillment. Although struggles during the Holocaust impacted on future life choices, they provided Gruenwald with both skills and optimism to succeed despite obstacles. This book is primarily about triumph and success, hope and hard work—not death and destruction.

Hermann Gruenwald was one of five children born into a wealthy Jewish landowning family in pre–Second World War Hungary. The Nazi occupation throughout Europe resulted not only in loss of land, but transport to Auschwitz, where both parents perished. Remarkably, all five siblings survived. Gruenwald’s work as a cook allowed him to avoid back-breaking forced labour, but more importantly gave him ready access to sustaining food. Five years after his liberation, unwilling to endure the Communist regime in Hungary, Gruenwald immigrated to Canada as a refugee, virtually penniless, with a new wife.

In the nearly six decades since 1950, his entrepreneurial skills, combined with hard work and dedication in many professions from manufacturing fur coats, hosiery, shoes, and underwear to selling real estate, have allowed him to acquire both wealth and status. All this time he has lived in Montreal, keeping his business interests in Quebec and maintaining a loyalty toward his hundreds of employees despite the continuing political turmoil.

Journalist and author Bryan Demchinsky has done a marvelous job in giving voice to one who went “from son of a rich landowner in a feudal system to Holocaust survivor, refugee, ordinary worker and finally businessman in a rich capitalist society.” In this riches-to-rags-to-riches story, Gruenwald accentuates the importance of the family unit, including the photographs of relatives who didn’t survive the Holocaust as well as their descendents and extended families who did. Like Gruenwald’s “vision” of a single stalk of grain that survives the scythe of the harvest, After Auschwitz emphasizes the importance of the individual in turning survival into success.