The Darkest Chapter: The Memoirs of a Survivor

This story covers David Ben-Dor’s boyhood and teenage years before and during World War II, and ends with an emotional crie de coeur as he approaches old age. David Ben-Dor was born in 1928 in Innsbruck, Austria, the elder son of the only Jewish doctor in town. Because of his father’s arrogant intransigence (despite his mother’s entreaties), he and his family missed many opportunities in the late 1930s to flee the wave of fascism that was engulfing Europe. Finally, they fled to Lithuania following the annexation of Austria. As one of the most competent doctors in Vilnius, David’s father treated the leading figures in the city, including the German high command. Surely, Jews like him were indispensable? He became involved in unsavoury dealings, helping a colleague to name those Jews suitable for removal to the notorious Kovno Ghtto where, inevitably, the doctor and his family were eventually placed. What follows is a story of survival in various concentration camps where David Ben-Dor’s father, mother and brother eventually perished. In 1945, weighing only 75 pounds, he was liberated from Dachau by the US Army. Instead of accepting the term holocaust , which the author feels is a blanket generalization to sanitize the truth, Ben-Dor stresses the need to remember what really happened: how survival involved measures of selfishness, resourcefulness and complicity, and how to cope with the guilt that would follow so many years later.