• Morris Glass and Carolyn Murray Happer, Chosen for Destruction: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor, Raleigh: Media Consultants Inc., 2011, 151 Pages, $14.95.
Chosen for Destruction is the personal story of Morris Glass, a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned by the Nazis from 1940 until he was liberated in May of 1945. Along with 3 million other Polish Jews, 39 members of Glass’ family died. Only Glass, his brother, and a first cousin survived.
Co-authors Morris Glass and Carolyn Happer — a retired history professor at Meredith College — use a unique method to present Glass’ story. His words are italicized, backed by Happer’s supporting documentation. As I learned as a student in her history class at Meredith, Happer is not just a history teacher — she is a scholar and presents a mountain of documentation confirming the memories of Glass.
Happer states, “The destruction of Morris’ family and the other victims of the Nazis did not happen in a vacuum,” and traces the roots of anti-Semitism from the era of the Crusades in the late 1000s to the Holocaust.
This is not just the story of Glass’ survival; it is story of the murder of 3 million Polish Jews. More Polish Jews were murdered than any other Jewish population in any other country, even Germany.
Americans are aware of the death camps like Auschwitz, but many do not know of the horrific conditions in the ghettos where Jews were imprisoned and died from starvation and disease. For Morris’ family and other Polish Jews, each move from ghetto to ghetto and finally to Auschwitz increased the move toward death.
In the first ghetto, Pabianice, he encountered hunger, disease, filth, fear, and death. The second, Lodz, added exhausting work and cold. The move to Auschwitz and the work camps moved hunger to starvation and death on what Morris calls “an unimaginable scale.”
On May 16, 1942, the Pabianice ghetto was liquidated, and every Jew had to leave home. They were marched down Warsaw Street to a large field where trucks took them to Lutz and Chelmno. Of the march, Glass says, “It was terrible — a nightmare, a hell. I watched the SS snatch infants from the arms of mothers and toss them into a pile, a pile that seemed to grow into a mountain as more and more babies were thrown on it.”
The story of Glass’ father’s death left me in tears. Glass notes, “The work camps was where I encountered the most vicious and sadistic guards.” By this time, his father was too weak to work, but he refused to go to the sick bay be•cause he knew he would die there. He stayed behind in the block when the others went to work. While they were gone,Glass tells how a guard named Talens “would beat my father below the heart and lungs in such a way that there were few marks.” Glass tells how after his father’s death guards extracted his father’s gold teeth while his body was still warm. Because Glass went to help bury his father without asking permission, he also was beaten. He called this the lowest point in his life.
Although I knew Morris Glass survived, I could not put the book down. The book left me in tears and angry. I wondered how so many people could commit these atrocities and how so many citizens of these countries turned a blind eye to what was happening.
The few survivors of the German concentration camps are now in their 80s and 90s. With this in mind, it is imperative that stories like Glass’ be heard, so that future generations will understand that millions of innocent Jews were tortured and murdered, especially since there are Holocaust deniers and individuals continue to join neo-Nazi groups.
The details of Glass’ personal story are shocking. It is a small, but powerful book — one of the best I have read in the last several years.