An Eye for an Eye

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The worst thing that happened to some Holocaust survivors was that they became like Nazis. How and why - and why they stopped - is the subject of this book. It is a story of Jewish revenge - and Jewish redemption. An Eye for an Eye is a riveting account of the appalling events that accompanied the end of World War II. In 1945 the Soviet Union, which occupied Poland and parts of Germany, a region inhabited by ten million German civilians, established the Office of State Security and deliberately recruited survivors of the Holocaust to carry out a policy of de-Nazification. The Office entered German homes and rounded up German men, women, and children - 99 percent of them noncombatant, innocent civilians - and took them to cellars, prisons, and 1,255 concentration camps, where inmates subsisted on starvation rations, where typhus ran rampant, and where torture was common-place. In this brief period, between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans died in the Office's custody. The book tells the story of what drove people who had been through unimaginable suffering to turn around and inflict the same on others. John Sack focuses on people like Lola, a young woman who became commandant of a prison, determined to avenge the death of her mother, brother, sister, and one-year-old baby . . . Pinek, Lola's gentle childhood friend who after the war became head of security for all of Silesia but never saw what was going on in his jurisdiction and, bitter because it had ignored Auschwitz, refused to allow the Red Cross to come and look . . . and Shlomo, a commandant who bragged that "What the Germans couldn't do in five years at Auschwitz, I've done in five months at Schwientochlowitz." (In fact, his arithmetic was faulty: the Germans at Auschwitz killed just as many people in five short hours.). Nothing has ever been written about this. To unearth the story, the author spent seven years doing research and conducting interviews in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. Sixty-fi