English Version Reviews, "We are Going to Pick Potatoes", Norway and the Holocaust, the Untold Story

 

 

The most exciting news of 2011 was the following endorsement from Nobel Laureate, activist and probably the most renowned Holocaust survivor in the world, Elie Wiesel, who stated the following:

This "untold story" about what happened to Norwegian Jews

during the Holocaust deserves to be told – and now it is.
                                        Elie Wiesel, Nobel Laureate

 

 

The story of the effort and extent to which the Nazi war machine would reach out in order to annihilate even the most remote Jewish family. The story of indifference and courage, of despair and hope, of silence and action. A very Jewish and very human story which should be told and listened to.

-Michael Melchior, Chief Rabbi of Norway, Former Cabinet Minister of Israel
 

 

Irene [Levin] Berman tells an important and-for most Americans-unknown story about the destiny of the Norwegian Jews during WW II. Being herself a Holocaust survivor, her style is emotionally very strong, though factual and sober. This comprehensive, moving and heart-rending book, with a welcome underlying optimism in spite of traumatic experiences, deserves a wide circle of readers in the U.S.A, far beyond those of Norwegian descent.

-Arnfinn Moland, Director, Norway's Resistance Museum

 

Irene Levin Berman has written a powerful, deeply moving book about a people, a place, and a time unfamiliar to many Americans. It is a story that should be widely known and remembered by all.

-Edward P. Gallagher, President, The American-Scandinavian Foundation

 

We Are Going to Pick Potatoes is a moving and courageous account of the Holocaust, its antecedents, and its legacy, and it illuminates a neglected side of European history. One might not associate Norway with the Holocaust, but the country’s story during this era is fascinating and devastating. In concise and vivid prose, Irene Levin Berman makes Norway’s story—and her own—come to life. We Are Going to Pick Potatoes is both excellent history and compelling memoir. It deserves a large audience.

–Mark Brazaitis, author of “The River of Lost Voices:  Stories from Guatemala," winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and “An American Affair: Stories," winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize

 

"We Are Going to Pick Potatoes" Norway and the Holocaust, The Untold Story by Irene Levin Berman (Hamilton Books) fills in a little-known chapter in Holocaust history. While in recent years, the story of the rescue of Danish Jews has come to light, little has been written about the Jews of Norway. Berman, who was born in Norway, escaped as a young child in 1942 - just days ahead of Nazi arrests - with her immediate family to Sweden, with the help of the Norwegian Resistance movement.  A pilot carried the 4-year-old girl in a knapsack through the forest and across the border.  Members of her extended family did not manage to escape and were among the more than 700 Norwegian Jews deported to Auschwitz. Based on extensive research into her own family's history and that of the Jewish community, she writes about Jewish life in Norway, before and after the war. She tells of those who returned to Norway to rebuild their lives and surrounded their wartime experiences with silence.

-Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week (New York), April 15, 2010

 

Levin's narrative is poignant . . . Yet her story rings true when she describes how groups of Jews were smuggled out of the country, referred to euphemistically as "potatoes," whence comes her book's title. Levin is also acute in describing the story of Denmark's King wearing a Jewish star out of sympathy with his Jewish subjects -- a total myth, albeit a beloved one.

-Benjamin Ivry, "The Arty Semite." The Jewish Daily Forward. June 4, 2010.
http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/128563/

 

Norwegian Version Reviews, “Vi skal plukke poteter”, Flukten fra Holocaust

 

Review by Jon Terje Groenli
Gjengangeren.no

In this powerful and extensive book the author tells us about her extended family’s destiny during the war – and she does this thoroughly – with a detailed story of several other members of her family –

The book contains self-experienced– despite her age – scenarios, but also a number of conversations with others who survived in Sweden and in the most dreaded concentration camps.  Most of all it deals with people’s self-experienced dramatic experiences, but the author is able to draw logical conclusions – and therefore the text to a great extent acquires an “internal” cohesion.

Review – Norsk Telegrambyraa (Similar to the Associated Press, which gives newspapers in the entire country access to the material.  63 papers took advantage of this)

She was never in Hitler’s extermination camps.  Still she calls herself a survivor from the Holocaust –she got away.  A large part of her family was not that fortunate.

This has finally – sixty-three years after the end of the war – resulted in a captivating story about her family, which to a great extent was exterminated during the war.  The dramatic, but simultaneously human story is being published by Orion Publishers.

Review – Nytt i Uka
Aalesund, October 2008
Reidar Skarboe

Powerful, important and pertinent.

"In this powerful and extensive book the author writes about her extended family’s destiny during the war – and she does this thoroughly – with a detailed story of several other members of her family –"

She was never in Hitler’s extermination camps.  Still she calls herself a survivor from the Holocaust – she got away.  A large part of her family was not that fortunate.

One asks oneself if there really is anything more to write about, when a new book comes out. It does turn out that there is indeed.  This author really has something to tell.

Most people are more or less familiar with the destiny of the Jews during the Third Reich so it should be superfluous to say that the material which the writer conveys is powerful.  In this book it seems even more powerful, since Irene Levin Berman expresses herself to such an extent in a matter-of-fact and down-to-earth manner.  The almost total absence of powerful adjectives places the horrendous events, for that reason, in an even more evident depiction.  It might be interesting to find out if this is done deliberately or if this quite frankly is the author’s way of expressing herself.  Regardless, it is extremely effective.

We owe Irene Berman a thank you for taking on and completing this impressive project.  She has written an important book – a book that we can learn from and gain wisdom, especially in a world where it appears that more and more people are forced to be on the run, and thereby looking for new places to establish a life for themselves.

And dramatic is exactly the word to describe the story by Irene Levin Berman, a Norwegian-American Jew who this week presented the book "We are going to pick potatoes", The Escape from the Holocaust.

But when Berman tells us a story about her close relatives, the Steinfeld family in Ålesund, then the victims get faces and identities, that’s when we realize that some of them were Norwegians just like you and me, only with a minor difference that they were also Jews.

Lea and Israel Steinfeld and their two children, Reidun and Morten were brutally murdered in Auschwitz.  Irene Berman can only remember that they were mentioned one time, it was said that they “disappeared”.  That was the expression that was used, that they "disappeared" – nothing more was said – it was too painful.

 

Verdens Gang, Versto on a Saturday

(The largest newspaper in Norway with the largest circulation)
– SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2008
By Olav Versto

Dramatic story
It’s extremely important that we also document the destiny of the Norwegian Jews during the war and that we are given books of great value like the one Irene Levin Berman has written.

When I read stories like the one Berman has given us, I quiver in rage over those eccentric hermits who have the audacity to claim that the Holocaust never took place and that they whole story is thing is fabrication.

But why didn’t more people try to get away?  Many felt that something horrendous was about to happen, even if no one could imagine annihilation, but who can?  Many met this threat with silence.  The author describes the silence in this way:  By failing to say anything out loud to other people they perhaps felt that they could avoid accepting the reality.  They managed to a certain extent to postpone this intense pain by quite simply not allowing it to get too close.

The library which accommodates the stories about the survivors of the Holocaust has gradually taken on enormous dimensions and continues to grow each year.  But the book written by Irene Levin Berman does not fit totally into the survival genre, even  if the primary title is “The Escape from the Holocaust.

Gudbransdoelen Dagningen, Lillehammer –
Egil Ulateig(this reviewer is also a well-known author of Norwegian books)
Problems related to survival

Irene Levin Berman’s book is just about free of horrendous descriptions.  It’s a chase – a sort of a detective story where she attempts to find relatives who have survived – and who did not survive, and at the same time, she finds herself.

Her family history is just as rich and swarming as a Russian novel, but the center of the book is her father, Marcus Levin, who in the 1930s had confronted discriminating Norwegian refugee politics and who after the war contributed with an enormous amount of work in trying to save the surviving Jews who were floating around Europe as shipwrecked sailors from a sunken ship.

The book is actually surprisingly free of hatred, revenge and accusations against Hitler’s many volunteers or involuntary helpers.  It also divulges an open and refreshing view on the Jewish environment, both in Norway and the USA where Irene Levin Berman now lives.  But she has gained insight into how important it is to hold on to the uniqueness, even the rituals that perhaps seem anachronistic and contribute to create divisions.

This is a family chronicle based on the annihilation which also affected her own family greatly – indeed what Norwegian Jew avoided this destiny?  I feel that I’ve come close to a tragedy and an environment as well as a vision of oneself which has given me additional insight.