Stay Alive

Berlin, 1939-1945

By: Ian Buruma

Narrated by: Ian Buruma

“Crisply told and uncomfortably relevant.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Exquisite.” —Wall Street Journal

“[A] far-reaching and masterly work.” —Library Journal (starred review)

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.

Surviving in a criminal state

This is an interesting collection of stories of regular germans living through the Nazi state at war. Timid resistors, lone jews living as u boats after the removal of most jews, artists and regular people trying to get through safely. During our current fraught times, this book raises the question in the reader of what would I have done. Would I resist? Or would I keep my head down and just try to ignore what is happening.

the story

the lives of different individuals in berlin during the 2nd world war,with an eyewitness to history

Triumph of the Human Spirit

One descends with author Buruma into the 7 levels of hell particularly the years 1938 with Cristalnacht To the suicides and mass rapes of mid 1945 with a curious detachment that so quickly becomes an unsettling awakening that while this all happened a long lifetime ago it is still happening today.

If one gains anything from this masterful and alternately frightening book it might just be that silent complicity in the face of inhumanity must be not only that it was the Berliner’s greatest crime but indeed our own today wherever and whenever we see prejudice, ignorance and injustice in our midst and do nothing to fight it.
For this alone author Buruma is owed not only our readership of this sparkling and sobering history but our undying gratitude as well.

Important book

Excellent book and a reminder to never forget. Well researched and well written. Highly recommend.