The Watchmakers: A Story of Brotherhood, Survival, and Hope Amid the Holocaust

The Watchmakers: A Story of Brotherhood, Survival and Hope Amid the Holocaust by Harry Lenga and Scott Lenga 352 pages

Scott Lenga interviewed his father, Harry, for countless hours before his death for more than a decade. Scott wanted to tell his father’s story, a story that cannot be made up or trivialized. It is the story of Harry and his two brothers escape from Hitler’s advancing armies and their survival through the Holocaust. This is not an easy read.

The first chapter gives readers some background from Harry’s birth in 1919 through his twenty-first birthday in 1930 in the Chassidic town of Kozhnitz (Poland). This chapter was slow reading for me as I struggled to keep all the members of the family straight, especially using their Polish/Jewish names.

In Chapter Two, the teenage years and learning to repair watches, the conversation is easier to follow.

As Hitler’s armies invade Poland, Harry and his two brothers know that as they ca stay together, everything will be all right. The men are sent to Warsaw and interred in the Ghetto. This is followed by the German Occupation, the Kozhnitz Ghetto, the Gorczycki Camp at Wolka, the Wolanow Slave Labor Camo, the Starachowice Slave Labor Camp, Auschwitz, the Death March, Mauthausen, Melk, Ebensee and finally, Liberation by the Americans.

Harry was the leader. They stayed alive by using their watchmaking skills to repair watches in the camps. But still life was hard. The bugs, the starvations, the beatings. Every time I think I have read every atrocity I think I can, I read of something much, much worse. It is amazing the brothers survived their ordeal.

 “The Watchmakers: A Story of Brotherhood, Survival and Hope Amid the Holocaust” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.