The Barnes & Noble Review
Cioma Schönhaus' derring-do and survival in Nazi Germany was "something to cheer about at last," a pastor told him in Stuttgart. It was September 1943. Schönhaus, a graphic artist, had been living undercover in Berlin, forging ID papers for Jews like himself. He had found refuge in Stuttgart, where he stayed one night with sympathetic Christian clergymen while en route from Berlin to Switzerland. He was fleeing Berlin, improbably, by bicycle. The Forger is Schönhaus' vivid, riveting memoir. To read it is to feel a powerful impulse, as the pastor did, to cheer him on as he recounts how he bobbed and weaved around countless treacheries to save other Jews and himself.
The book, which is ably translated from the German by Alan Bance, is, of course, a latecomer to the body of Holocaust literature. Yet, unlike the Jews described, say, in Elie Wiesel's writings or William Styron's Sophie's Choice, Schönhaus transcends the fate of Holocaust victim. His account seems refreshingly new because of the exceptional image it presents of a Jew trapped in Hitler's Germany who, relying on guts and guile, cavalierly defies the Gestapo, rescues others, and escapes.
The story begins in 1941, when Schönhaus was 19 years old, a hot-blooded youth dreaming of nothing so much as getting a girlfriend. The vise that was Hitler's master plan to exterminate the Jews was closing tightly around his family.
Summoned to meet a Gestapo official, Schönhaus and his mother learn that the family is to be deported to the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. At the time, Schönhaus was operating a lathe in a munitions factory, retooling old gun barrels for use in machine guns -- a job he had wangled because it theoretically exempted him from persecution. But the official had a different idea: "The fact is that we at the Gestapo do not like separating family members."
Although Schönhaus appealed, an order to deport him along with his parents remained in effect until the very day, June 2, 1942, of the family's departure. As Schönhaus waited with his parents at Gestapo headquarters, ready to be hauled away, another official deferred him, seemingly on a whim. Both his mother and father were to die at Majdanek.
Schönhaus almost certainly could not have remained out of the Gestapo's clutches in Berlin for as long as he did without the protective shield of Jewish resisters. The backdrop of the resisters' network is an intriguing part of the German capital's wartime history, and Schönhaus depicts it dramatically.
The resisters protected Schönhaus in return for his skilful services as a forger. One guardian angel was Franz Kaufmann, a World War I veteran and civil servant, who risked his life to help fugitive Jews. Kaufmann supplied Schönhaus with ration coupons, which he needed to buy food once he went underground, quitting his factory job so he would have more time to produce counterfeit ID cards. Other resisters harbored him in safe houses.
But even with plenty of money (he cashed in by selling household goods that had belonged to his parents and other relatives) and safe houses at his disposal, Schönhaus was in constant jeopardy of being caught. When staying for a long stretch at a safe house seemed too risky, he looked for rooms to rent. He would arrive in the evening, when it was too late for a landlord to register him with the police, as the law required. The next morning, saying that he had received unexpected orders to report for military duty, he would clear out.
He was a meticulous artist, and while he was not always cautious, he did have extraordinary good luck on his side. With reckless abandon he carried on an affair with a married woman whose husband, a German army sergeant, was off fighting in the war. When the woman's sister-in-law turned up at the apartment, Schönhaus scrambled under the bedcovers, undetected, in the nick of time. Nor was he circumspect about calling attention to himself as a big spender. He bought a mahogany sailboat for Sunday jaunts on Lake Havel. He lunched in fancy restaurants, such as the one at the Hotel Esplanade favored by the Prussian aristocracy. His descriptions of the food and wines he consumed are mouthwatering.
Schönhaus' recall of ordinary details from his life more than four decades ago is astonishing; at times, his memory can seem too good to be true. That he could accurately replicate verbatim his conversations from the early 1940s, as he purports to do, strains credulity. His self-serving justifications with regard to some of his choices and compromises are also somewhat troubling. He had no compunction about living the high life in Berlin while so many people around him were suffering hardship, he says, because as his parents' "representative," he believed that he had "a duty to experience all the pleasures" they were denied. He was not wrong to support the Nazi war effort as a munitions factory worker, he suggests, because he sabotaged some gun barrels on the production line. By tilting his story in these directions, Schönhaus breaks some of his narrative's spell and poses a nagging question: what liberties with the truth might he have taken?
Recklessly losing his bogus ID papers on a tram, Schönhaus unleashes a chain of events that culminates with his photo being plastered on "Wanted" posters around Berlin. His life ever more in jeopardy, he flees toward the Swiss border, armed only with a forged military passbook, copious maps, and a cover story: if the police stop him, he will say that he is an army draftsman on a week's leave.
Schönhaus intended to hop a freight train bound for Switzerland and bypass German border guards. He scrubbed the plan because he suspected he might have been detected casing a railway embankment. That left him with a fallback scheme devised on the fly: he would feign an invitation to visit Ferdinand Schmidt (a name he found in the local telephone directory) at his country house hard by the Swiss frontier. Somehow Schönhaus would make a dash for it.
The plan worked, sort of. Confronted by soldiers, he bluffed his way past them. He proceeded to the door of Ferdinand Schmidt, only to be turned away. Other cliffhanging moments ensued.
Suffice it to say that Schönhaus made it to Switzerland, where he lives today. He travels to Germany frequently, talking about his book. In a preface, his translator notes: "What is most impressive about Cioma is that he is not at all embittered." Impressive, yes, but not surprising, considering Schönhaus' tendency to plug forward with hope, rather than look back with recrimination. Indeed, that trait was a key to his survival. --Joseph Rosenbloom
Joseph Rosenbloom is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a former staff reporter for The Boston Globe and the PBS documentary series Frontline.
From the Publisher
In Nazi Germany, twenty-year– old graphic artist Cioma Schönhaus found a unique outlet for his talent: he forged documents for people fleeing the Reich, ultimately helping to save hundreds of lives. Even as the Gestapo posted his photo in public, he lived a daringly adventurous life, replete with fine restaurants and beautiful women, all the while managing to elude the Nazis until he could escape in the most unlikely of ways—by bicycling to Switzerland.
“A catalog of hairbreadth escapes, clever ruses, and brazen coups” (New York Times), The Forger is an astonishing and remarkably buoyant tale of wartime heroism and survival.
The New York Times -
William Grimes
In the vast literature devoted to the Jewish experience under the Nazis, Mr. Schonhaus's slim book deserves a special place, as much for its tone as for the remarkable events it records: a catalog of hairbreadth escapes, clever ruses and brazen coups. The background is undeniably grim, and his personal circumstance dire, but Mr. Schonhaus relates his experiences with an often joyful bounce and a dry sense of humor.
Publishers Weekly
This memoir of a Jewish man's experience in wartime Berlin is less a tale of suffering than of courage. By 1942, Schönhaus's family had been deported; the 20-year-old was spared because he worked in an arms factory. In that year, he began using his graphics background to forge IDs for Jews in hiding, and eventually went underground himself. His efforts, aided by anti-Nazi Germans, saved the lives of hundreds of Jews. He maintains a determined tone about the war-"At last, I didn't have to just look on helplessly at what they were doing to us," he writes about being asked to forge documents-but Schönhaus's account has all the elements of a thriller. (In fact, Schönhaus's story is being made into a film.) Despite the doom around him, he lives boldly, enjoying sailing escapades and sexual encounters with women, seemingly defying the Nazi authorities to find him until he flees over the border into Switzerland. While adding to our knowledge about wartime Berlin, this work also tells us something about how the human spirit can thrive amid destruction and tragedy. (Feb. 1)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Kirkus Reviews
The author energetically chronicles his life as a young Jew living underground in Nazi Germany. Born in Berlin of Russian immigrant parents, the 20-year-old Schonhaus saw his entire family deported to concentration camps in 1942. His own deportation was temporarily deferred due to his "voluntary" employment at an arms factory, where other Jews taught him to sabotage German gun barrels to prevent them from firing. The former graphic-arts student was then hired by prominent and heroic Jewish sympathizers to forge identity passes. He eventually used his talent to counterfeit hundreds of cards and passports for Jews threatened with deportation to Auschwitz and Majdanek. Schonhaus's intelligent, engaging voice truly emerges in the second half of the book, where he describes his adventures as a Jew living under the Gestapo radar. He adopted the wildlife survival tactic of mimicry, determining that the more he acted like a swaggering German, the less likely anyone was to suspect that he was an illegal Jew-and the longer he would stay alive to aid the persecuted. Encouraged by memories of his father's wisdom, Schonhaus lived like an apparent Prussian prince, dining in high-class restaurants, learning to sail, falling in and out of love. He resourcefully continued to frustrate the Gestapo, who posted his wanted photo all over Berlin. Heavy on adventure and light on violence, this brand of Holocaust memoir frees the author to voice the raw, poignant questions that Jews outside the camps pondered: "Would you have a toothbrush there?... Surely my vision of white huts was wrong. Where was Mama now? What had she been forced to see?" The climax delivers both structurally and emotionally, as Schonhaustosses his bicycle in the bushes to swim the rest of the way to freedom in Switzerland, where he still lives. A courageous, surprisingly buoyant memoir from one of modern history's most somber eras.
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