By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — I have known Peter Kubicek for several years now, and we often correspond by email, forwarding news links about all kinds of subjects, mostly on Jewish themes, from one Internet mail box to the other. Kubricek is in his early 80s and was born in Czechoslavkia in 1930. A Holocaust survivor, he was in six camps as a teenage boy, and after liberation in 1945 he made his way to America with his mother to join his father — and her husband — who had gone to New York before the war.
In the 1980s, Kubicek started writing his memories down, mostly for his children, twin daughters born in New York. Later, he expanded his memoir into a book, and this fall he re-issued it in new edition that has been further expanded, including many black-and-white
photos of him and his relatives, before and after the war. Told as he remembers what happened to him as a boy, the book resonates in a way that many more famous Holocaust books do not.
Kubicek’s book is titled Memories of Evil: Recalling a World War II Childhood because it’s about his life as a young boy before he was taken away from his home and put in the camps and his life in the camps on a day to day basis. He survived, against the odds, as he says in the book, and he says he owes it all to pure luck. In some many personal instances he experienced in a heightened reality inside the camps, as the memoir tells, things could have gone wrong and he would not have been here today.
Memories of Evil is really a must-read for current — and future — generations. Surely, if put in the right hands of a veteran Hollywood screenwriter, Kubicek’s story could become a feature movie. It’s that compelling and that powerful.
What makes the book so powerful is that he takes you inside the camps Kubicek was in, up close and personal, and the reader feels as if he or she is reading a diary.
Do you, dear readers, remember how spent your 15th birthday in America as young
boy or girl? Kubicek remembers his 15th birthday this way in the book: “For some very special reasons I remember that birthday with a clarity that the [70] intervening years cannot dim. I spent the day of January 26, 1945 lying on a cot in the sick bay of the German concentration camp Haselhorst in a suburb of Berlin.”
“We knew that the end must be near and that the defeat of Germany was just a matter of time. If we could just survive a few more months our nightmare would finally be over. That knowledge gave me the strength that my [tired and sick] body otherwise lacked.”
Memories of Evil was published in paperback and on Kindle in November. “I mailed out copies of the book to friends all over the world, including one to you in Taiwan,” Kubicek told me in a recent email.
“The books that went to Europe were all already acknowledged by recipients, but Taiwan, being in the middle of nowhere, obviously it takes longer. But I do still hope the book reaches you.”
It did. Deeply.
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com