‘My Name is B-1259: I Survived Nine Nazi Concentration Camps’
By Michael Brown
Michael Brown Novels, 359 pages

The Sun’s reviewer begins this column with a letter to the son of the subject of Michael Brown’s novel, Elias Feinzilberg.

“December 18, 2023
Dear Mr. Feinzilberg,

I spent most of last night reading ‘My Name is B-1259,’ the account of your father’s suffering in nine concentration camps. It brought back memories of my two visits to Auschwitz, in 1979 and 1980. Just this morning I read about the death at 101 of an escapee from the Holocaust as a 15-year-old, Guy Stern. He was a colleague of mine at Wayne State University. My first article for publication, written in 1966 as an undergraduate, was about Primo Levi’s account of his time in Auschwitz. Standing in front of that Auschwitz gate, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to enter under that sign Arbeit macht frei (“Work Sets You Free”). To have that experience repeated so many times, as it was for your father, is unbearable to imagine, and yet it has to be done, as it has been done in the book you have brought to my attention.”

Michael Brown’s novel, written at the request of Elias Feinzilberg’s son Jacob, is a first-person narrative in the present tense, adhering closely to the publicly recorded memories of Elias, who just died at the age of 104. 

Chapter headings read like letters, with return addresses such as: 

Allensdorf-Liebhof Labor/Concentration Camp
Camp #1 – November 2, 1940

Feinzilberg, living in the Łódź ghetto, is captured by the Gestapo, and by Chapter 9 he is on a train that comes to “shuttering stop” at the Dachau Railway Station.

No escape seems possible: “We know we’re in Germany but we have no idea how to find our way back to Łódź.” They have no money, and even if they did a “fellow worker, starving and desperate, might report any of us who attempt to escape for an extra ration of food.”

And yet, Feinzilberg does escape — and even makes it back to Łódź — only to be recaptured and sent, on an improbable but true journey, to eight more concentration camps before the war is over. One daring escape occurs when he is commanded to change a tire, which he begins to do, pretending to lose his grip on it as it rolls away and he runs after it and then to momentary freedom, figuring his guards will not want to admit that they have lost track of a prisoner. 

On another occasion, he saves his life by lying about his prowess as a mechanic — and then he sabotages the motor pool. Other times he plays the role of pliant prisoner, biding his time, even as he is lashed for failing to wake up a work detail on his watch.

He observes the infamous Dr. Mengele, “with no characteristic I can see that would make him stand out.” At another point, as inmates too weak to work are selected for the gas chambers, he punches himself in the face, “hoping the blows bring color to my complexion to make myself appear healthier than I am.”

In early January 1945, in spite of all his suffering, and now in his sixth camp at Gross-Rozen, he remains alert, watching the “sun linger on the horizon and then slip away, leaving an array of orange, gray, and purple. The colors fade as darkness creeps over us, and we trudge through ankle-deep snow, making toward the camp’s entrance.”

He gets news listening to the camp SS drivers and hears the Germans are “getting clobbered.” He even knows about the attempted assassination of Hitler. Will prayer help? He confesses: “sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.” By April 1945, there is no food, and camp inmates are ordered to stay in barracks as hundreds of others are “led to their execution.”

After a period in a rehabilitation camp, Elias Feinzilberg settled in Guatemala and then in Israel, leading a full life with wife and new family. “My Name is B-1259” includes photographs of the Feinzilberg family before the war. Elias was the only survivor. Other photographs show him with Golda Meir and Benjamin Netanyahu. Elias Feinzilberg met with the president of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, at the January 2020 Auschwitz 75th anniversary.

Mr. Rollyson’s essay,“Tyranny: Survival in Auschwitz, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” was published in “Honors College Essays, Michigan State University, 1966-1967.”