By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — For Holocaust survivor Peter Kubicek, 83, the thought of Amazon selling Nazi-themed items makes him sick to this stomach. He’s taking his protest straight to Amazon, and he was recently interviewed on Canadian television about his protest. A resident of Queens, N.Y., Kubicek is an active Internet reader and news surfer.
When we exchanged emails recently about a British newspaper report about Amazon selling Holocaust denial and white supremacist books online, he told me: “Look at this filth being peddled on Amazon. I am actually trying to do something about it and have had correspondence with people of influence to try and shame Amazon into dropping this.” And he is. He has written letters to Amazon and several New York area newspapers.
“I posted a comment on Amazon’s review pages for one of those books mentioned in the British tabloid,” Peter told me by email. “As a result, I received a phone call on October 22 from a reporter from a Canadian TV station. He set up an interview with me via my FaceTime capability on my Mac computer. It was an interesting experience, but I don’t know whether it lead to anything.”
I have known a Peter for several years now, and we often correspond by email, forwarding news links about all kinds of subjects, mostly on current events, from one Internet mail box to the other. He is 83 now and was born in Czechoslavkia in 1930. He was in six labor camps as a teenage boy, and after liberation in 1945 he made his way to America with his mother to join his father 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 he has 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 and well-known Holocaust books do not. Which is why I would recommend this book — available on Kindle and in paperback via the very same Amazon he is angry at — to readers here.
The memoir 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 his later life in the camps on a day to day basis. He says he owes his survival 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.
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Danny Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan. He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com