Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora »

Pierre Berg (Beverly Hills, CA) was held prisoner in four different concentration camps, from January 1944 until May 1945. He emigrated to the U.S. following World War II. Now retired after forty years as a machinist in the movie industry, he keeps himself busy ushering at L.A. playhouses. Brian Brock (Los Angeles, CA) is a freelance writer.

"From Pierre Berg's opening words, to his decidedly un-lucky detention by Gestapo officers, all the way through his internment in Drancy, Auschwitz, Dora, and Ravensbrueck, Scheisshaus Luck is a harrowing, clear-eyed testament of one young man's experience of the Holocaust. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, this autobiographical account of a Gentile French teenager's odyssey of horror and survival recounts Berg's day-to-day struggle for survival in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhuman conditions, exhaustive slave labor, and near starvation." Relentlessly unsentimental, yet tinged with a sense of brutal irony, Scheisshaus Luck provides a new perspective on some of the Nazis' most notorious concentration camps. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazis' "Final Solution," Berg's memoir stands as a searing reminder of Nazi crimes. Scheisshaus Luck is a major addition to Holocaust literature, and a young man's haunting account of one of the darkest periods in history.

Frederic Krome - Library Journal

Soon after the end of Word War II, French-born Berg first drafted a memoir of his years in Nazi concentration camps, but this finished work awaited collaboration with freelance author Brock almost 50 years later. Berg was imprisoned by the Germans first in Drancy (near Paris); then Auschwitz-Monowitz, where he toiled at I.G. Farben's Buna works; and then Dora, where the V-2 rocket was made. He ended the war at Ravensbrück after surviving his second death march. His memoir is one of the few available in English by a gentile inmate of Auschwitz and an even rarer chronicle of experiences at the Dora plant. His insight into the workings of the Auschwitz black-market system and the relationship of the Kapos (camp trustees) to political and religious prisoners helps illuminate the corrupting effect of Nazi brutality on prisoners. Berg's personal journey-from the emotional upheaval of being caught in a German sweep in Nice to the gradual deadening of his emotions as he struggled to survive among the worst concentration camps-is compelling reading, although there are details that are evidently colored by ex post facto knowledge. While the coarseness of some of the language may offend some (e.g., the title in vulgar translation is "Shithouse Luck"), it is integral to the story, bringing home the nature of the cruelty these inmates experienced. Highly recommended.

Pt. I Drancy 3

Pt. II Auschwitz 39

Pt. III The Death March 167

Pt. IV Dora 189

Pt. V Ravensbruck 211

Pt. VI Wustrow 223

Epilogue 271

Afterword 279

Glossary 297