How Dark the Heavens: 1400 Days in the Grip of Nazi Terror / Diary entries recall time spent under Nazi control from 1941 until liberation in 1945.
Memoirs describing the author's flight from Jonava, Lithuania, to Daugavpils, Latvia, in the first days of the war; life in the Daugavpils ghetto; escape to join a partisan unit, and his experiences with the partisans in Belarus, where he encountered negative attitudes toward JewsJune 22, 1941 -- the first day of Sidney Iwens's long nightmare. The night before, he had been at a dance, enjoying himself with the other Jewish boys of his small Lithuanian city. Now he stoodwatching a dogfight between two distant planes. Tomorrow he would be fleeing for his life -- a flight that would last for nearly four terror-filled years.
Lithuania, Latvia, and White Russia, directly in the path of the invading Germans, fell into the murderous clutches of the first SS Einsatzgruppen, the Special Action Groups whose only mission was to kill Jews. In four months, aided by virulent anti-Semitic Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other native peoples, they shot 250,000 Baltic Jews. And that was just for starters. Sidney himself, herded together with other boys and young men in a city prison,reached the very gates of the killing ground, only to be reprieved temporarily -- because the SS had run out of ditches.
Thereafter, his life became a patchwork of hiding, pretending to be a skilled workman (and thus worth the Germans' while to preserve for a time), fleeing to the partisans, returning to the ghetto, and finally being shipped west to Dachau.
Sidney tells his story in diary form, reconstructed from memory of the diary he actually kept during the Holocaust years. he tells of his bittersweet romance in the shadow of betrayal and death, of the horrendous experiences of his friendsand fellow survivors, of having every hand against Jews, even fellow enemies ofthe Nazis, of the occasional acts of generosity -- usually from the most unpredictable source, German soldiers themselves -- of his slow starvation and final rescue (like his first) at the gates of death.
This vivid and dramatic story of a Holocaust survivor is in a class by itself -- a day-by-day recounting of murder, heroism, stoic endurance, good luck, bad luck, love, intrigue, and humanity.
