Stay Alive

Berlin, 1939-1945

De: Ian Buruma

Narrado por: Ian Buruma

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation

In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse.

Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, the book is a study in extremes—depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism.

By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not “Auf wiedersehen” or “Heil Hitler” but “Bleiben Sie übrig”—“Stay alive.” And by war’s end Berlin’s population had fallen by almost half.

Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma’s own father, a Dutch student conscripted into forced labor in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. This is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. It’s a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"In wartime Berlin it was possible to find every form of human behavior, from conformity and cruelty to bravery and indifference. Using his father's memories and letters as well as a wide range of other sources, Ian Buruma has composed a brilliant account of what it felt like to be there. Stay Alive is a beautifully written account of a city under military and moral siege." — Professor Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

“Ian Buruma, renowned for his enduring work about German and Japanese guilt and complicity during World War II, now adds a searing chronicle of wartime Berlin, told in part through the experience of his own Dutch father there. Beautifully written and deeply researched, Stay Alive is particularly haunting in showing how ordinary Germans conformed with Nazism and the persecution and deportation of their Jewish neighbors. It makes a chilling warning of how people can acquiesce and look away from the worst realities.”
—Gary Bass, author of Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

“An exceptional excursion into the multiple, contradictory lives, voices and dilemmas of Berlin’s inhabitants during the Nazi war years, almost hallucinatory in its incessant matter-of-factness. By providing a compelling and compulsive immersion into that crucial period of history, Buruma also eloquently reminds us of how, in our own time, the temptation to look away from persecution and injustice has terrifying consequences.” —Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum