Last Monday was the birthday of my dad, Leonard Gross. He would have been 97.
When he turned 87, his book, The Last Jews in Berlin, which had recently been republished by Open Road Media, became a bestseller. He died two days later, and we didn’t get the news about the book climbing the charts until the day after that. Talk about bittersweet.
Dad may not have known about his book’s resurgent popularity, but he was thrilled that The Last Jews in Berlin had been thrust back into the limelight. Now, a decade later, the New York Times bestseller has never been more relevant.
Originally published in 1982, The Last Jews in Berlin weaves together the real-life stories of a dozen Jewish men and women who, during World War II, remained in hiding in Berlin–Germany’s capital and the epicenter of Nazism. Four thousand Jews had gone underground in Berlin in 1943. Most did not survive. Bombing raids killed some. The rest, with the exception of just a few hundred, died in the gas chambers, having been ferreted out when forced to surface to seek black market food, medication, counterfeit papers, money, or new hiding places. Those who did make it had to live by their wits, relying on resourcefulness, luck, and for some, the generosity of other conscience-stricken Germans.
“The Last Jews in Berlin is a vividly recounted story of ordinary people rising extraordinary heights to save their own and others’ lives,” reads the original hardback’s jacket cover. Those ordinary people included a young mother, a scholar and his gentile countess lover, a black-market jeweler, a fashion designer, a Zionist, an opera-loving merchant, and a teenage orphan.
The New York Times Book Review wrote, “The author’s skillful selection of detail and his narrative drive have created the type of footnote [to history] that illuminates an entire subject.”
As hard as it is to fathom, that history of hatred lives on. In the 12 months following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, American Jews were subjected to more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League. That represents three times the number of cases reported to the organization during that same period a year before. The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot better on the antisemitism front.
I’m glad my father isn’t alive to witness this. I’m also glad through the staggering research and moving narrative in The Last Jews in Berlin, he can still speak to what can happen when a people become dehumanized.
