Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

by Pierre Berg, Brian Brock

Librarian's note: There is an Advance Reader Copy for this edition of this book here.

In 1943, eighteen year old Pierre Berg picked the wrong time to visit a friend's house--at the same time as the Gestapo. He was thrown into the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. But through a mixture of savvy and chance, he managed to survive...and ultimately got out alive. "As far as I'm concerned," says Berg, "it was all shithouse luck, which is to say--inelegantly--that I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life."

Such begins the first memoir of a French gentile Holocaust survivor published in the U.S. Originally penned shortly after the war when memories were still fresh, "Scheisshaus Luck" recounts Berg's constant struggle in the camps, escaping death countless times while enduring inhumane conditions, exhaustive labor, and near starvation. The book takes readers through Berg's time in Auschwitz, his hair's breadth avoidance of Allied bombing raids, his harrowing "death march" out of Auschwitz to Dora, a slave labor camp (only to be placed in another forced labor camp manufacturing the Nazis' V1 & V2 rockets), and his eventual daring escape in the middle of a pitched battle between Nazi and Red Army forces.

Utterly frank and tinged with irony, irreverence, and gallows humor, " Scheisshaus Luck" ranks in importance among the work of fellow survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. As we quickly approach the day when there will be no living eyewitnesses to the Nazi's "Final Solution," Berg's memoir stands as a searing reminder of how the Holocaust affected us all.

Genres: Holocaust, History, Nonfiction, World War II, Memoir, War, Biography

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 2008

About the author

In 1947, at my first job in California, a coworker inquired about the tattoo on my left arm.

"It was my license plate in a Nazi concentration camp. I lost half of my weight there. From 145 lbs to 72 lbs."

"We had a rough time, too, here in the U.S. She said. We had to eat chicken all the time."

Thinking that someday I might forget what I went through in those 18 months, I wrote down my odyssey. I was twenty-one years old. Those recollections sat in a drawer for over fifty years.

The title of my memoir is Scheisshaus Luck because it was shithouse luck that I survived.

I escaped a selection to Birkenau's gas chambers because I did a good job washing my blockelster's shirts.

I fell asleep in a warehouse and was written up for an escape attempt, but because the man who tattooed me had a shaking hand, they mistook the 9 for a 3 and another poor soul was hung in my place.

I turned 19 in Auschwitz. I carried the body of a Jehovah Witness out of the camp's brothel. She had committed suicide because she couldn't be anyone's whore.

I helped deliver the ashes of 900 human beings to women toiling in a cabbage patch. From the looks of the heads of cabbage we made good fertilizer.

I barely survived the death march out of Auschwitz, then found myself working on circuit boards for the V2 rockets in Dora. When I could, I gave those boards hell.

I fell in love with a girl in the Paris camp of Drancy before we were shipped to Pitchi Poi. In Auschwitz I dreamed of reuniting with her, but I had no fairy tale ending.

I am a gentile. I want the skinheads, the neo-Nazis, the Holocaust deniers to come to me and say that the Holocaust is just Jewish propaganda. I want to help put a cork in the bile they spew.

Reviews

[Pierre Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is what The Kirkus Review had to say about my Holocaust memoir, Scheisshaus Luck


"The harrowing story of Berg's time in Nazi concentration camps, related with "irony, irreverence, and gallows humor" that led co-author Brock to urge him to publish it a half-century after it was written.

The pair collaborated to amplify and clarify the original manuscript, but retained the cocky voice of a French Resistance member only 18 years old when he was arrested in Nice in late 1943. On a train full of prisoners, Berg met Stella, a pretty Jewish girl with whom he snatched some stolen sex and happiness at the Drancy transit camp near Paris. There he also had the misfortune to encounter the Gestapo agent who had arrested him in Nice; the agent ordered him sent to Auschwitz. But the "shithouse luck" of his book's title, Berg explains in his preface, meant that he "kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life." A minor clerical error caused another Häftling (prisoner) to be hung in his stead. Berg got to carry on collecting corpses, digging trenches and cadging the occasional extra ladle of watery soup that sometimes made the difference between life and death. Like other survivors, he graphically recalls the beatings, hunger, sickness, selections, stink, despair and omnipresent death. Berg's mechanical skill and proficiency in German, English, Italian, Spanish and a bit of Russian, in addition to his native French, contributed to his Scheisshaus luck. The young Häftling was sent to the caves of Dora, where he assembled V-1 and V-2 rockets as a slave of IG Farben. When freedom came, he was caught between the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing, marauding Red Army. He was searching for Stella, never forgotten during his 18 months in the camps, and the randomness of life proved itself once again.

A worthy supplement to the reports of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel."

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I've found on the Holocaust, because instead of dry, analytical commentary on what happened, it is the personal narrative of someone who experienced it.
Pierre Berg is a Frenchman who was accidentally arrested by the Gestapo when he was visiting a Jewish friend.

Instead of seeing Auschwitz from somewhere above it, as an onlooker, we see the concentration camp through the eyes of a young man who experienced it. The reader has to have a strong stomach to survive reading some of the monstrous things that occurred in these camps, but it is good to read about it, in order to better understand what happens when a bureaucracy runs wild, and enables evil people to have their way.

One question it answered for me was whether the German people knew what was going on. Even the Allies did not know about the innocent prisoners inside the "factories" as they flew repeated bombing raids over the camps. Although the prisoners sensed that the enf of the war was near, they were in dread as the air raid sirens sounded and the bombers began their destruction.

It's better to read firsthand accounts than revisionist history speculations.

I would recommend Scheisshaus Luck to anyone interested in history, government, or the psychology of criminals.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I've ever read. I read it last spring but couldn't write a review of it at the time because the book made my emotions so raw. I finally checked it out of the library again last month, started reading it, but had to stop 100 pages in. It hurts too much. The writing and story are both so intense that my heart was breaking. This memoir does not skimp on horrific details and it's intense. It's absolutely devastating that people lived through tortures such as these.

[Becki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best Holocaust account I have read. I wish that this book could have come out earlier when I was still in school, because I think it is a priceless addition to any high school English course.

So many important and little known facts about the Holocaust are in this book. For instance, this is the first book I've seen that deals with someone being sent to the concentration camps just because. Pierre is not a Jew, nor a Gypsy, nor any of the other groups that the Nazis attempted to exterminate. He just happens to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. He is fluent in four languages and can understand many more, so he also has more experiences and accounts to tell from conversations with other prisoners.

This book was written only a few years after the author escaped from the camps, so the memories are very strong. Pierre explains everything very well, so it's easy to follow along with the timeline from his capture to his escape. The writing is superb, and so realistic that I literally couldn't put this book down.

I have read many Holocaust memoirs, but this one resonated the most. Many reviewers have recommended that it be read along with Elie Wiesel's "Night". I would also suggest that it be read with "I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree", which is a Holocaust memoir written by a woman who was a little younger than Pierre, and was rescued by Schindler.

Read it. I have nothing else to say. This is the most important book I've read in years.

[Avi B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir is written by a gentile who was imprisoned in Auschwitz as a political prisoner. I found this book very interesting and quite detailed. He went through an horrendous ordeal as you can imagine and the some of the things he witnessed were awful and not for the faint hearted, for example cannibalism. I enjoyed his style of writing and got through the book fairly quickly. I would have liked to know more about his life after the war and if he ever found love again. I would recommend this memoir to anyone who is interested in this subject.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can read stories of the camps, you can watch documentaries of the camps, you can even sympathize with those in the camps, but you'll never actually GET it.

The closest we can come, is to experience it through someone else's view, someone who was actually there, who lived the grueling awful torture.

I don't know why I continue to be fond of first encounters of places like Auschwitz because it rips my very soul in two when I read the words that must have been so incredibly difficult for the person to write.

Berg wrote his book in a manner that doesn't sensationalize any parts of his experiences. He tells it plain and simple how he was treated as a Non-Jew. I had read many times in history books and other memoirs I have discovered about this topic that there were French in the gas chambers, but I never actually connected with it because they were so few compared to the Jewish people slaughtered by the Reich.

If you're looking for a "story" of the holocaust to read....this isn't the book for you. It reads much more dry then that, but if you are looking for a subjective view that reads almost objectively with no embellishments to ease your mind and stomach, then this is definitely a good read.

I'm thankful I read it and am thankful Berg had some Shithouse Luck on his side.

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually had the luck of befriending Mr. Berg on Myspace before he published the book and before the days of Facebook. He found me through a search of people who had interests in the Holocaust and Auschwitz and sent me a friend request. He was such a delightful man and was promoting this book. Every day he would have a blog post about his experiences in Auschwitz so as soon as I found out about the release date I preordered the book. It is perhaps one of the best survivor stories I've read yet (and I've read soooo many). I think the most interesting parts of his stories were that there was a dark humor in the camps which I've never heard from any survivors accounts before. I thought that showed so much about the human spirit, that no matter what you do some people are still able to thrive and survive against all odds. My favorite quote was "I kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life." My stepdad read it and then my friend read it as well. It's one of those books you can not put down.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars rounded up to 5. A really good book.

I've read several books about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's concentration camps - Elie Wiesel's Night, Roman Frister's The Cap, Heinz Heger's The Men with the Pink Triangle. Surprisingly, none of them brought home to me on a personal level the severity of conditions in the camps, like Berg's book has. The heavy labor, the randomness of why one person dies and another lives. The starvation-level rations - including days or weeks where the inmates scrounged for anything to eat - shoe leather, dandelions and grass, and (in at least one case) cannibalism of the recently deceased. And the constant emotional wearing down, so that witnesses to the cannibalism just sat and watched, unable to find the energy or empathy to stop the act.

While Wiesel's story is that of the Jewish experience, and Heger's from the viewpoint of a gay man, Berg's memoir is from the viewpoint of a French teenager who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - the finest example of his "Shithouse Luck". (In fact, the "Scheisshaus Luck" of the title has two meanings - Berg's bad luck that causes him to be sent to Auschwitz, and the incredible instances of luck in that "shithouse" that made it possible for him to survive.) It was especially significant to me that, in addition to the groups we've known of that were sent to the camps - Jews, Romani, Communists, Jehova's Witnesses, criminals and political prisoners - the camps also included random citizens from Germany and the occupied countries, sent there by whim or as payback. The Auschwitz sub-camp of Monowitz (one of the four camps experienced by Berg) even had a contingent of British POWs - though, because of the Geneva Convention and regular Red Cross packages, conditions for them were far better than for the majority.

Although the memories in the book are Berg's, the completeness of the memoir is thanks to Berg's cowriter, Brian Brock, who took Berg's original manuscript, asked Berg questions to flesh out details, polished it, and helped to bring everything together in the final product. Both men admit it was a painful process, reliving (or, in Brock's case, forcing Berg to relive) the experience of the concentration camps. But the result is a stark, clear picture of everyday life in the camps.

[Victoria Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely on a par with Elie Wiesel's Night, and therefore the best Holocaust Memoir. I was quite annoyed to read the other day that this book "cannot be compared" with other memoirs such as Wiesel's, presumably because Berg's a Gentile and therefore not one of the largest group of victims. He endured the same horror alongside Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, atheists, Germans, Poles (and many other nationals), some of whom were Communist, some criminal, some civilian, some just luckless like him ... You get a greater and more nuanced sense of the diverse humanity who were caught up in this horrifying ordeal and the myriad ways in which they coped, or failed to cope, with it.

Here's why his book IS the best:

1. It's more reflective than any other memoir. By this I mean he supplies plentiful inner dialogue and self questioning, which very few other memoirs do. He speculates and wonders, juxtaposing past and present, putting himself in others' shoes, thus infusing his horror-filled narrative with a keen awareness of everyone else's suffering as well as his own.

2. It's more unflinching than any of the others. He is prepared to go to very dark places, including rape, cannibalism, theft and murder among prisoners and liberating allies, thus evidencing an honesty and thoroughness also rare in other memoirs. He tells us things about his own behaviour that most others omit. How many would admit they "disguised" a bedmate's death in order to get the dead man's breakfast? He labours to show us his existential battle between empathy and loss of empathy.

3. It's funnier than any other memoir. Some reviews allude to his humour as evidence of cynicism, presumably because he's a self-identified atheist. In fact, he comes across as every bit as human and humane as any other memoirist. He refers to the way the "devoted" believers of various religions are deserted by their God, which there can be no doubt they were. He describes absurd, sometimes even surreal, incidents with candour and biting wit. As a red-blooded teenager on his arrest and deportation, he tells of his love of women and his yearning for the lovely Stella

I absolutely loved this book and keenly admire the writer for his wit, empathy and fortitude. I'm not sure who or what to thank (certainly not "God") that Berg survived to tell us his story.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the few concentration camp memoirs written by a Gentile. The author was picked up for his activities in the French Resistance at the age of seventeen and wound up in Auschwitz. As he notes throughout the story, he is both very unlucky and very lucky -- unlucky to have been imprisoned, lucky to have survived at all.

I would like to know more about Berg's relationship with his parents. He hardly mentions them: he just says they left him to his own devices a lot after he was ten. After his liberation he was reluctant to return home or even contact his family to let them know he was alive, which seems very strange to me. I think there must have been something there.

[Mark Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

While reading the first half of this book, I thought I would land up giving it a 4 Star rating but once in the second half, I was down to 3 Stars. Why you ask? Although I do believe he experienced somthing that no living creature should ever need to endure, I wondered how much in the second half was actually fact or dramatization to sell a book. For somebody who nearly straved to death, he is (in my opinion) portrayed as a cross between Indiana Jones and James Bond. It seems hard to believe that he was able to bounce back with so much energy in such a short time. Apart from this criticism, the horrors of the concentration camps is well described.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing...I didn't think I would actually "enjoy" a book about the horrors of Auschwitz but the way it was written made it a real page turner. What these poor people went through was nothing less than horrifying but to have survived it was a miracle. Def recommend this book!

[Kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read many books about the Holocaust, and found myself becoming ambivalent and/or numb to the horrors and tragedies of that horrible period of history over the past couple of years. In light of this realization, I decided to distance myself from books on the subject and return to them at a later date, so that I wouldn't find myself not really acknowledging how terrible and earth-shaking the events of the second World War were.

This book brought everything back into perspective in vivid colour, as Pierre Berg's book seemed to come to life in my hands. As I read about the trials and tribulations he and millions of other human beings endured at the hands of Nazi forces, it felt as if the book was breathing in my hands, its pages rippling from the unspoken words of all those who perished as a consequence of Hitler's desire for a "pure" race. I was repulsed and frightened by Berg's recounts of cannibalism, thievery, and unadulterated hatred that ran rampant behind the walls of Auschwitz and Dora (among others), and found myself questioning if all of this could have really, truly happened.

Well, after Googling "Holocaust" and looking through images of the thousands upon thousands of emaciated bodies thrown into pits and piled on top of each other, I think I've once again convinced myself that this has happened.

What struck me most about Berg's book was the epilogue, where he revealed that he didn't necessarily think his story was one worth telling because he was an atheist political prisoner - he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time in Paris, and potentially could have survived the War being none the worse for wear. But I found myself reading his words and thinking that his is exactly the type of stories that need to be told, as they bring everything into sharped focus: the Holocaust was not just Germany versus Jews, but rather hatred versus humanity. Berg's book was also harshly realistic; unlike Holocaust novels that end with protagonists seeing lights at the end of tunnels as they're emancipated from concentration camps, sighing large breaths of relief that life can once again resume, Berg clearly outlined how the emancipation of these camps was not the end of the war for many people who had been detained. On the contrary, many people survived the camps simply to be destroyed by famine or Communist soldiers after the fact, and this harsh dose of reality was very sobering.

Berg's parting thoughts, as well, very forcibly summarize his opinion on the Holocaust, and will stay with me for a long, long time:
"We have never learned from history, so I hate to admit that I'm not optimistic that the genocide and enslavement on the scope orchestrated by the Nazis will never be repeated. [. . .] we all know that the extermination of innocent human beings designated as 'other' [. . .] continues unabated and unchecked. That doesn't mean the voices of reason and the victims of atrocities should ever stuff their thoughts and recollections in a drawer. We'll never find utopia, but that doesn't mean we should stop seeking it. Just maybe, some day, the human race will conquer it's learning disability."

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierre didn’t expect to be celebrating his 19th birthday among other prisoners and perhaps he thought he would be at least celebrating it with his family. Here was Pierre alive and working on his 19th birthday in a Nazi concentration camp during WW2 and depending on how you look at it, that could be a good thing or bad thing. In Pierre’s book we are allowed a true accounting of the world he existed in during the Holocaust during his eighteen-month capture until his nightmare was finally over with his arrival back home after the liberation. Pierre survived four concentration camps as a teen. His struggle to survival and make sense of what was occurring around him is something you will just have to read. Starting with a small romance with a Jewish girl Stella, Pierre keeps this fire inside himself hoping that someday he will be reunited with her once his nightmare ends. It’s a struggle to survive from the conditions Pierre endeavors to the jobs he has to perform. Day-in and day-out the mental anguish and physical abuse toughed you or sent you out to the trucks. The stories he remembers he writes with such details and energy that they come alive on the pages. Great book if you like this type of history. Thank you for sharing your story Mr. Berg.

I truly enjoyed this book. There were so many stories that I treasured after reading it. I loved the line “By no means was I going to become a mile marker.” This line was taken when they were doing their Death March after leaving Auschwitz. The story about being in the cattle railroad car and stopping all the time was another remarkable story. Sharing the beds, incredible story also. The eels….crazy story there. I could go on but then I would give away most of the book. Just know that there are lots of interesting accounts that Mr. Berg shares that will make you stop and think.

It’s really hard to find a word that can describe how you feel after reading a book like this. You feel so much for the survivors, there is great sadness for what they had to go through, for what they had to see and experience. There are no words that can describe the evil that that one man did that caused so many individuals pain and suffering. I am so thankful, appreciative and grateful that individuals like Mr. Berg share their true accounting of what they went through so we know the truth. I realize sometimes that it is hard to bring up the past but we need to know the past so the past will not repeat itself and we need to know the truth. Thanks again for sharing your stories.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierre Berg went to Auschwitz by accident. He was not Jewish by birth or belief; in fact he was an atheist. But he was visiting a friend when the Gestapo came to that house in Nice, France. He had a fake I.D. because he was a messenger for the French underground. If the Gestapo knew that, he would have been executed right away. Instead he was taken to do cleaning in a quarantined ward. This is where he fell in love with Stella, another prisoner. He always smelled back from cleaning the outhouses and was named the Dandy of the Shithouse. They had a store room of clothes there, they had plenty to eat. Then everyone was taken away to Germany. The previous prisoner experiences were like a wonderful dream world to him.

The experiences that he had were not those of the Jewish people, wearing the yellow triangles but of a political prisoner. He was not taken to be gassed or burnt. He still could have been `selected" for death. This book is filled with details because he wrote everything down after two years of being released. He still has a serial number; every day ate a strange thin brown soup that may have been made from beets, a small portion of bread and a token piece of butter. Sometimes there was no food or water. He still wore gray and blue pajamas like clothes that were never washed all the time. He still saw many atrocities committed by the Nazis.

One scene in this book literally made me sick so this book needs to be approached with a strong stomach. There is another scene that I will never forget. The the darkness when their train arrived at Auschwitz and when families were torn apart by dividing up by sex and age. Then they were told to strip, only keeping their belts.

This is not the "one" book about the Holocaust or even the main one, but this is one of the very many that you need to read in order to know what went on. I believe to get the whole picture; you need to read many books by different kinds of survivors and books about those who did not. Pierre used his memory of Stella, his girlfriend to stay alive. Without that he may not have.

I highly recommend this book to people wanting to learn about the Holocaust but also hope that readers will make a constant effort to keep learning more.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is what the Kirkus Review had to say about Scheisshaus Luck:

"The harrowing story of Berg's time in Nazi concentration camps, related with "irony, irreverence, and gallows humor" that led co-author Brock to urge him to publish it a half-century after it was written.

The pair collaborated to amplify and clarify the original manuscript, but retained the cocky voice of a French Resistance member only 18 years old when he was arrested in Nice in late 1943. On a train full of prisoners, Berg met Stella, a pretty Jewish girl with whom he snatched some stolen sex and happiness at the Drancy transit camp near Paris. There he also had the misfortune to encounter the Gestapo agent who had arrested him in Nice; the agent ordered him sent to Auschwitz. But the "shithouse luck" of his book's title, Berg explains in his preface, meant that he "kept landing on the right side of the randomness of life." A minor clerical error caused another Häftling (prisoner) to be hung in his stead. Berg got to carry on collecting corpses, digging trenches and cadging the occasional extra ladle of watery soup that sometimes made the difference between life and death. Like other survivors, he graphically recalls the beatings, hunger, sickness, selections, stink, despair and omnipresent death. Berg's mechanical skill and proficiency in German, English, Italian, Spanish and a bit of Russian, in addition to his native French, contributed to his Scheisshaus luck. The young Häftling was sent to the caves of Dora, where he assembled V-1 and V-2 rockets as a slave of IG Farben. When freedom came, he was caught between the retreating Wehrmacht and the advancing, marauding Red Army. He was searching for Stella, never forgotten during his 18 months in the camps, and the randomness of life proved itself once again.

A worthy supplement to the reports of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel."

[Corinne Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

It doesn't matter how many Holocaust memoirs I read, I am always amazed by the fact that the human spirit can withstand so much and still survive. Scheisshaus Luck provides a new perspective - that of Pierre Berg, an 18 year old from France who was involved with the Maquis (the French Resistance) and ended up spending time in Auschwitz.

Pierre glosses over nothing. His experiences give depth to the inhumane treatment of all prisoners in death camps. Part of this story were almost more than I could handle - and like I mentioned, I've read many memoirs. I needed my strong stomach when I read about the treatment and conditions that Pierre had to endure I think part of what made this book feel darker than others is the fact that, since Pierre was an atheist, he had no faith in God or some higher being to turn to when things were at their worst. To Pierre, it was all luck, so there are few, if any, passages of beauty found in hardship or faith.

In his opinion, bad luck sent him on that first train ride East and that landed him with horrible duties in the camps. And it was only good luck when over and over again random events would transpire to enable him to survive another day. One thing he did recognize was that a friend, even one good friend, was enough to provide the hope and support one needed to get out of bed each day.

This book is not for the faint of heart. There are images in my mind, still, that horrify me. And yet - memoirs like this one serve an important purpose, and as trite as it sounds, it's absolutely true: they convince us that events like the Holocaust must never happen again.

[Marla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this in the wee hours of the morning and had to weep silently in the bed as my husband was sleeping and I did not want to wake him up.

So many readers have already far more eloquently than I have written such wonderful reviews of this must read book.

Having become online friends of both Mr. Berg and Mr Brock made the experience of reading Mr, Berg's story even more amazing because I would read something he wrote 2 days ago and then be reading about what happened to him 60 years ago later that night. That doesn't usually happen. Or sharing a story with Mr. Brock.

Finishing this book this week after the shooting at the US Holocaust Museum perhaps made it even more painful because you see and know and can't hide from the fact that evil still exists but we must also always continue to fight against it as best we can.

Please buy this book. Tell your friends to buy this book. Have your children and grandchildren read this book. It is important.

As a reader, you feel you are there with Mr. Berg. And you laugh when he laughs. And cry when he cries. And feel the moments of despair when you think he will give in but then pulls himself up and goes on.

You realize Schiesshaus Luck exists for many people in many situations and why we don't know.

Thank you Pierre for sharing your story and for Brian working with you to write this amazing story and for fate that brought you two together.

[SueAnn Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently obsessed with this book. I read it in two days. I am now re-reading it and making notes of some of the language used--some of the sentences jump off the page.

By the cover, this book could be misjudged as 'just another Holocaust story'--but it's very different. I would love to see this book re-released with a different cover, as it would draw in more readers besides Holocaust historians. (I found this in the library with the other Holocaust books.)

Pierre Berg was not Jewish. He was a 'gentile' atheist. He was arrested by the Nazis for being in the wrong place at the wrong time--that's all the Nazis needed to arrest someone and turn his life into a living hell.

There is a romance that weaves through the book, keeping Pierre going in spite of incredible odds. He comes out a survivor.

[Neeta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing biography about a French man who was 18-years-old when he was caught and put in concentration camps for 18 months. He was not Jewish and was put in the camp because of assisting others in hiding from the Germans. He was part of the large population of non-Jewish prisoners in the camps (Resistance workers, communists and other political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and gypsies), who went through the suffering of the Holocaust. His story is told in a matter-of-fact manner from a teenage boy's point of view, very graphic and miserable, truthful and unspeakable, with an occasional underlying tone of gallows humor. He falls in love, makes and loses great friends, and comes out alive by what he quotes is pure "Scheisshaus (shithouse) Luck."

[Cari · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best Holocaust books I have read. For me its a struggle to read about something so painful and horrific. Pierre Berg writes in such graphic detail that you travel back in time through his memory. This book will have you sitting on the edge of your seat with the horrific experiences people in concentration camps were faced with. Just when you possibly think something can't get any worse, Pierre Berg describes unspeakable stories after another through out the entire book.

[Jodee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pierre Berg may have found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time in 1943 landing himself in Auschwitz as a resistance fighting teenager, but he most certainly found a good team member when he joined forces with Brian Brock. Scheisshaus Luck opens a door to a piece of history needing hearing by a strong voice needing to tell it and a team member willing to walk alongside to pull the story through. An excellent job. Highly recommended.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting, & hard to put down. However, it is NOT on a caliber with Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi. I had a hard time believing what a jack- of-all-trades this author claimed he was back in the 1940s when he was a mere teenager when this story takes place. After awhile it just seemed like Rambo, super human. I've never doubted previous Holocaust literature, but something about this one seemed too over the top & contrived, & I came away not trusting the author.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started Mr. Berg's memoir in college but didn't get enough time to finish it. I'm very glad I decided to purchase and read the memoir completely after I graduated. I loved this memoir, it's unique and gives you a more detailed look into what happened in the camps during World War II. You feel the real rawness of the situation Pierre is in with his memoir, you get scared when he is, feel bold with him and feel the confusion of why all this was happening.

[Siti Musliha · Rating 1 out of 5]

How do i even begin? Never thought i could hate a book but this one i had to give a review about. There are way too many miracles and well like he said "luck" that it make me think twice to believe the whole situation he went through. I thought the book will get better but it came to a point i close my ebook and deleted it off. Too draggy . And too much of " Indiana jones and james bond " drama going on.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can I not respect the heck out of this guy for getting his story heard (and enduring what he did for 18 months)...and the co author for helping to get his story out. Every survivor story has my mouth gaping open and my heart breaking for the Terror they went through and the things they witnessed.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very unsentimental memoir of Pierre's 18 month experience in the Nazi death camps of WW2... talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time! Just when I was starting to think that a lot of these WW2 memoirs were sounding the same, this one comes along. Courageous & thought-provoking

[Lonni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a different twist on a Holocaust memoir - 18 year old French resistance fighter who gets caught by "bad luck" so luck becomes the theme - very readable - very different from a Jewish perspective!

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent personal account of a young man's experience during the holocaust is a must read for those following the literature. This is an excellent first person account of camp life and the grim marches after the allied invasion.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another memoir, this one about WWII and one man's journey as a Muslim through the camps. Also very graphic and a bit depressing, but another good history of evil.