Scheisshaus Luck: An Introduction To My Memoir

Pierre Berg, 16 years old

In 1947, after 18 months in German Concentration camps, I moved from Nice, France to California. At that time no one in the U.S. really cared about Auschwitz or what would later be termed "the Holocaust." So to insure I wouldn't forget what happen to me I wrote down my odyssey. I was twenty-one years old. My mother, bless her heart, typed it up for me. I spared her many of the more revolting things I saw and went through. Once finished it sat it in a drawer for over fifty years.

                Pierre, 1946                                                 

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

I saw a man's head caved in with a shovel because he had diarrhea and that is an affront when a Nazi dignitary is making an inspection.

I witnessed men hung for stealing bread to stop their hunger while their Kapos, convicted murderers, rapists and thieves, placed bets on who would die first. 

I've watched the Sonderkommando unload bodies, then I helped deliver the ashes of what I calculated to be 1200 human beings to women toiling in a cabbage patch.  From the looks of the heads of cabbage we made good fertilizer.

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 celebrated my 20th birthday in Auschwitz.  I carried the body of  Jehovah Witness out of the camp's brothel. She had committed suicide because she couldn't be anyone's whore. 

I barely survived the death march out of Auschwitz and found myself working on circuit boards for the V2 rockets in Dora.  I did what I could to make sure they didn't work without getting my neck stretched by the noose. 

I still have a few shards of shrapnel from a Red Army tank shell in my ass. 

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, even after I escaped the Nazis and was recuperated in a German village I hoped that I would see Stella again. But, I had no fairy tale ending.

               Pierre, 2008                                                 

I am a gentile. I am a Holocaust survivor. 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.

BUY SCHEISSHAUS LUCK