Daniel Himmel

Many people today compare the lives of the Palestinians with the victims of the Holocaust and boldly state that Israel is no different than the Nazis. I hope they all read Daniel Himmel’s book, A THRIVER’S JOURNEY, to discover the major differences between both situations.
In September 2004, Jan Himmel, a young teenager in Carpathia in the 1940s, was asked to speak at his New Jersey synagogue’s dedication of a Holocaust memorial. Jan asked his son Daniel to give the speech. Daniel was used to public speaking but this was a new topic for him. He finished his talk in tears and the experience changed his life. His father immediately told him "to write the whole story down."
Trying to prepare for the speech made Dan aware of how much he didn’t know and he felt guilty because he never asked questions about his father’s family. He knew he didn’t have grandparents but knew nothing about them. Daniel and his father set upon a long project of getting Daniel to ask the questions and Jan to provide the answers. It wasn’t easy. Like many who survived the Holocaust, Jan had not spoken of what he had seen and endured. Locking the memories away enabled Jan to move on but kept Daniel from knowing family history
A THRIVER’S JOURNEY tells the remarkable story of Jan’s life both before and after the Holocaust. Those changes and experiences have been told many times in many forums. This is one of the best presentations I have ever read. It begins by talking about what it was like before the round-up of Jews and how people of all faiths interacted peacefully. Once Nazi influence entered, former friends became enemies. When it came, the Jews didn’t fear the round-up because they believed they would be going to labor camps and would receive food, which was in short supply at home.
The story continues describing the victims’ lives in the concentration camps, both those who survived and those who didn’t. Jan was incarcerated in several camps including Auschwitz and Birkenau. In the last two, Dora and Ellrich where rockets were produced, conditions there were so bad that prisoners, learning they were being sent there, would run into the electrified fences at their current camps to commit suicide. Just before the end of the war, he participated in a Death March until the arrival of American troops.
After his health improved, Jan went back to his family home to see who else survived and try to reestablish his life. When he got there, the townspeople avoided him and the families living in his house drove him away. He was arrested just for being there but managed to escape.
He got to Great Britain where Leonard Montefiore had received permission to transfer up 1000 orphans under age 16. Even by raising the age to 18, only 732 children were in the group; so few children survived.

By then Israel was about to become a state. After Jews began emigrating to Palestine in increasing numbers during the 1930s, anti-Jewish violence increased. The Peel Commission proposed a two-state solution but it was abandoned because of continuing violence. Britain, which controlled Palestine after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, set a limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants between 1940-1944. More could come only with permission of the Arabs who had sided with the Nazis during the war. The Arabs continued attacking the Jews. More than a hundred Jews were killed and mutilated after the surrender of the Etzion kibbutz. The Jews went after the British and the Jewish forces, Palmach and Irgun, went after each other’s forces. Jan went to Palestine to be part of the new state and witnessed some of the most well known actions during Israel’s War of Independence, including the shooting at the Altalena.
He later went to Canada where he faced disapproval from people making moral judgements about the survivors: Why hadn’t they fought back? What had they done to survive when so many others didn’t make it? He ended up living in the United States.
Besides being a story of life as a concentration camp prisoner and Holocaust survivor, A THRIVER’S JOURNEY is the story of what Jan did to maintain his will to live and his sanity. While in the camps, "Dad never permitted himself to dream....A spirit temporarily lifted up by thoughts of a better place comes crashing back down twice as fast the second eyes open to reveal that bondage still exists. Too many of these ups and downs eventually shatter a man’s will to live."
"Anger is a powerful emotion....It usually winds up directed outward, toward a specific target, and typically dissipates after enough time has passed. Despair and guilt, seemingly not as potent, are often focused internally–and in the end, they typically wind up being far more toxic."
While many people try to excuse violence by victims of persecution, A THRIVER’S JOURNEY talks about why that didn’t happen with the survivors of one of the most horrendous crimes against humanity. Dad never asked ‘Why me?’ In fact, throughout my life I never once heard my father say that he felt sorry for himself. I never heard him ask the world to compensate him for all the tsuris it had dumped on him."
Hearing his father’s story led Daniel to question "What in my life legitimized my father’s having made it back from the camps with his?" At the end of the book, Daniel explains his use of the word "Thriver." It is most appropriate.
Were it not for the photos, it would be easy to believe A THRIVER’S JOURNEY to be a work of fiction. Jan’s life is saved so often in so many circumstances beginning when a commotion broke out while he is standing in the line to the left at Auschwitz which allowed his brother to pull him into the line at the right and hide him.
Daniel relates that World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided. On March 1, 1936, Germany re-occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, a violation of the treaty that ended World War I. A large military French force with ten times as many soldiers, was across the border, waiting for orders to intervene. The orders never came.
This book brought new information about the Holocaust primarily as it affected two men, the father who lived it and the son who heard about the experiences for the first time. As I mentioned earlier, it is one of the best I’ve ever read.
I received a copy of this book from Goodreads First Reads.… (més)

A Thriver's Journey has allowed me to share my father's story, connect myself to a family long lost, and find myself along the way.
It is a difficult subject, and therefore this book can be exhausting as you leaf through it's almost 318 pages, but it is a subject that needs to discussed and taught for generations to come. Never before have I seen such care and thoroughness applied to a book about the Holocaust. Every single page is packed, and I mean PACKED, with every tidbit of information you could possibly want to know. You could literally spend hours with it in your lap and just scratch the surface of what's inside.
This book is an absolute and definitive must for any person who has an interest in the history of the Holocaust.
It is still difficult to comprehend the cruelty of which people can be capable, and that is part of what makes her story so important. It is only through the telling of these stories that we today are able to begin to understand what truly happened. This is a story that needed to be told, and it is a story that needs to be heard.

This book is amazingly raw and honest. It is a devastating and important account of history. The reader can almost hear the story told through Daniel's own voice. A powerful read to help put present day life into perspective.

It was difficult to read without crying for the first few chapters. It's written as he spoke about it, it gave me the feelings as if I was sitting at a table listening to him speak.

It's horrifying to think of this atrocity happening to anyone, but knowing his Dad survived- make that, thrived afterwards, is just extraordinary!… (més)