A Survivor's Revelations

...At the right moment, no one and nothing could impede me from doing what had to be done to retain a chance of survival...

...Providence also received an assist from an aunt who had gone to Paris before the War, and from two uncles who had wisely moved to Australia at the same time...

...Later in the book the author says, "I do not fear a repetition of the mass murder practiced by Hitler against the Jews and other 'inferior' peoples.'' Then why use Auschwitz so freely as a metaphor...

...I forced myself, although only a child, to be 'tough' in order to get by in the merciless grown-up world around me-a world whose reality one cannot grasp if one depends on such abstract concepts as honor, dignity, or human rights...

...I learned...to be hard and to keep myself rigorously apart...

...And, although he passed up offers to practice in Beverly Hills, his roster of clients in Paris included some of the world's most glamorous film stars, as well as producers and directors...

...My wartime background," he writes, "was something I talked about to no one...

...Liberation brought problems of a different kind to the three friends...

...And Birkenau, Camp D, where I was immediately consigned, was like the center court at Wimbledon-the ultimate...

...The author gives a disarmingly honest account of their activities amid the chaos that followed the collapse of Nazi Germany...

...He was also on the boards of banks and companies all over Europe...

...When it appeared in Europe, under the title Weapons for Peace, the volume stirred debates in several parliaments and was hailed by President Valery Giscard d'Estaing as "the bible on East-West relations...

...Pisar arrived on these shores from Australia in the summer of 1954...

...That they managed to stay together most of the time, and to reunite after short periods of separation, despite the daily quotas for gassing that were being met, was nothing short of miraculous...

...Pisar's immediate family, his parents and a little sister, were killed early...

...No one can seriously argue with the proposition that it makes more sense to trade goods with one's adversaries than to exchange bullets...

...What counted was the basic animal instinct to endure...

...I do fear a repetition of the mass murder practiced by Hitler (and I suspect so does Pisar), as long as the world continues to be obsessed by the "Jewish question," now generally referred to as the "Zionist question...

...I told myself...

...Gis-card d'Estaing's noble speech at Auschwitz does not reassure me in the least, considering the political embrace he has given to those who threaten the mass murder of Jews today...

...To speak of Wimbledon and Auschwitz in the same breath, even in irony, is jarring...

...Nor does Pisar ever really convince us that his personal Holocaust experiences shed light on the present international predicament...

...By that time Pisar wasamemberof the Washington, D.C...

...But impressive as all these achievements are, it is Pisar's recollections of his life before 1954, a past he had carefully kept private, that make Of Blood and Hope such a compelling memoir...

...Pisar is all too prone to sweeping historical generalizations and inappropriate analogies...

...But the author's excessive rhetoric mars an otherwise superbly realized memoir by a man who has undertaken at last to speak of the horror in his past-for himself, for his two friends, both dead now, and for the six million...

...The logical outcome...

...Although I share Pisar's fears of the militarists on both sides of the East-West struggle, I also wonder about some of his friends...

...In 1962, he set up a private law practice in Paris...

...Pisar's purpose in evoking the past, he informs us, is "to help me and others to understand the present and, more important, the grave dangers ahead...

...In truth," says Pisar, "the viciousness of camp life and the amoral j umble of the postwar scene had badly impaired my sense of right and wrong . . . Today, when I marvel at my escape from the Holocaust, I thank Providence not only for sparing my life but for saving me from the spiritual abasement toward which I was heading...

...And no one could have suspected where I have been raised...

...They demonstrate again the relentlessness of the drive to annihilate the European Jews, and how close the Nazis came to achieving their goal...

...Pisar pays moving tribute both to his truly remarkable family and to the civilizing influence of Australia-where he acquired a high school diploma, a law degree from the University of Melbourne, and a sense of fair play and sportsmanship...

...and California bars, and licensed to practice as a Barrister-at-Law in London and a Counselor at Law in Paris...

...The arms race may indeed lead to a world conflagration, but why not speak of a "global Hiroshima," rather than a ' 'global Auschwitz...

...Returning to his native city of Bialystok on a visit in 1961, the author found that only nine Jews still lived in what had been a thriving Jewish community of 60,000 before the War...

...Reviewed by Robert S. Rosen Associate professor of German and Comparative Literature, Baruch College, CUNY The author of this autobiography is now, at age 51, a highly esteemed international lawyer representing multinational corporations and banks, advising governments, chairing conferences of world leaders on both sides of the Atlantic...

...Auschwitz was the logical outcome of these upheavals and of the ominous hatreds they inevitably engender...

...That "wartime background" is the story of a Polish-born Jew who, between the ages of 13-16, was dragged through Hitler's most notorious annihilation centers-maidanek, Auschwitz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and others less well known...

...Pisar owes his own survival to an admixture of luck, cunning and detentiin-ation...

...And Pisar's "shy and idealistic" Harvard classmate, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, pictured smiling at us alongside the author, has contributed greatly to the misery of impoverished Third World countries unable to pay the high price of oil...

...He tells us, for example, that Hitler "was the progeny of economic depression, of deep unemployment, and rampant inflation...

...Why Pisar's long reticence on the subject...

...there, with great understanding and tact, they were helped to return to a normal peacetime existence...

...The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, on hearing Pisar's story, speculated that he was able to survive because he was "at precisely the right age"-old enough to make it into the adult column, but young enough to have retained "pliability and adaptability...

...Making up for lost time, they roamed the countryside on newly acquired German Army motorcycles, doing a thriving business in the black market and passing the nights with German women...

...My manner and clipped speech...were closer fo those of the British gentry than to any other group...

...that the facts were too brutal, and that I wanted people to react to me as an individual rather than as a symbol...

...But the telling of such a life requires no elaborate justification of this kind...

...Equipped with a scholarship and Carnegie grant, he pursued his graduate studies at Harvard...

...The facts are certainly brutal, but desperately relevant even if the lesson they convey is not exactly the one the author intends...

...After completing his doctorate on East-West trade, he became a legal officer with unesco in Paris, and later a consultant to the State Department and adviser to President Kennedy...

...the danger lies in the world's forgetting that very basic fact...

...Pisar and Ben were taken by his relatives to Australia...

...One is somewhat taken aback, as well, by Pisar's unfortunate use of language in describing Auschwitz as "the crown jewel of the star-studded Nazi archipelago of concentration camps...

...At Auschwitz, these luxuries were useless and even detrimental...

...Pisar's deeply held belief in the efficacy of detente, the USSR's record on dissidents and its recent aggressive behaviour notwithstanding, is often persuasive...

...Pisar became best known, though, for his book, Coexistence and Commerce (published in 1970), which he regards as "the apex of my intellectual achievements in the things I hold real.'' It was well received both in this country and in the Soviet Union...

...Pisar knows better than most that Auschwitz was a real event in space and time...

...An important factor also was young Pisar's friendship with two fellow inmates: Ben, a childhood friend from Bialystok, and Niko, a Dutch Jew twice the age of the boys who became "a resourceful older ally in the daily struggle with death...

...Within myself, I put aside all sensitivity, all modesty...

...I became cautious and resourceful...

...If this part of Pisar's life, at least, reads like a Hollywood success story, there is a good reason: It was in that capital of make-believe that he met his wife-to-be, the daughter of a movie producer, on a blind date...

...Surely that is not how the 13-year old perceived it...