I’ll never forget the steely look that this formidable man— who killed his first German as a boy— turned on me
Auschwitz liberator and former child-spy Max Privler, whom I was privileged to interview a few months ago, opened my eyes to the largely untold story of the nearly 500,000 Jews who fought in the wartime Red Army.
And the postscript to our conversation reminded me of another effect of the Holocaust: young survivors robbed of the Jewish traditions they would have been raised with.
Max’s story was scarcely believable. Raised as the son of a wealthy landowning family near Stanislav, Poland (today called Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine), he had survived multiple mass killings by age 12, including one where his father had taken a bullet to protect him. He then joined the partisans and finally the Red Army as it fought across Eastern Europe. By the time he was bar mitzvah, and with his knowledge of multiple languages, he rose to become a highly decorated spy in a secret unit operating behind enemy lines.
I’ll never forget the steely look that this formidable man — who killed his first German as a boy — turned on me as he thought I was skipping over vital details of those war years.
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