163256: A Memoir of Resistance

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

This account by a Holocaust survivor is moving and clear. Michael Englishman, né Engelschman, was born in the Netherlands in 1921, and so he came to manhood just in time for the Nazi occupation of his country. His wife and family perished in the camps, while he survived through some good luck and his skills as an electrician. He is bitter about Dutch Nazis who ran camps for the Germans in the Netherlands, angry at the International Red Cross, which did nothing to ruffle Nazi feathers, furious with Jews and non-Jews in the camps who acted as little Hitlers, but grateful that he found a dead friend’s children at war’s end. He had sworn to look after them if he and they survived, and fate led him to link up with the children’s mother, who also escaped the gas chambers. He married her, once the Dutch government declared that those who failed to return from concentation camps were legally dead. The remainder of the story concerns his life in Canada, apparently happy and modestly successful. This is a well-told story—one that adds to what we know about the fate of Dutch Jewry.