Research Catalog

On burning ground : a son's memoir

Title: On burning ground : a son's memoir / Michael Skakun.
Author: Skakun, Michael.
Publication: New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DS135.B38 S58 1999	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

235 pages : portraits; 25 cm

Summary

On Burning Ground is the dramatic account of one man's improbable efforts to survive the Holocaust. Fleeing the slaughter in his Polish hometown of Novogrudek (Navaredok), Joseph Skakun assumes a series of false identities - first as a Christian, then as a Muslim, and finally as a recruit of the Nazi SS - in order to stay alive in the vortex of hell. Constantly fearing exposure and death, Skakun lives to see the downfall of the most brutal horror of the modern age.
Finally emigrating to America, he tells his tale of nerve, dissimulation, and desperate inwardness to his son, who has recounted the tension and anguish of his father's struggle.
Weaving philosophical meditations into his father's horrific wartime story, Michael Skakun offers a personal, yet epic, account of war and bloodshed, of unspeakable cruelty and unnameable crimes. With remarkable insight, Skakun uncovers a profound locus of experience, the twinning of fear and identity, as well as the complex and tortured relationship between the abuser and the abused.

Subjects

Contents

Prologue I: Winter 1999 -- Prologue II: Fall 1944 -- Ch. 1. Death Selection in Novogrudek -- Ch. 2. Escape Plans -- Ch. 3. Into the Forest -- Ch. 4. Across the Nieman -- Ch. 5. Entry into Lida and Vilna -- Ch. 6. Sojourn in Sorok Tatar -- Ch. 7. Border Crossing to Berlin -- Ch. 8. Blood and Soil -- Ch. 9. Gestapo Interrogation -- Ch. 10. Enlistment in the Waffen SS -- Ch. 11. Liberation -- Ch. 12. Return -- Epilogue I: Paris -- Epilogue II: New York.

ISBN

031220566X

LCCN

99021744

OCLC

ocm40869803

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries