Dealing with Satan

In July, I wandered to Stockmann's bookstore together with my significant other to find my friend a birthday present. On my way to the cashier I noticed a pile of books on sale and glanced through the selection. My eye was caught by a striking title in Finnish: sopimus saatanan kanssa, original title being Dealing with Satan. The cover featured a jerked black and white picture of a wooden shack surrounded by barbwire and Magen David in the back.

Even a mediocre blonde like myself could put two and two together and figure what the book is about but, as they say never judge a book by its cover, I picked up a copy and read the back cover. And then I purchased the book for myself (my friend got something lighter to read). And then I started reading it immidiately, pushing aside that damn boring JFK bio I had been stuck with for months.

The book is written by Hungarian-Jew Ladislaus Löb who is a WWII survivor. This is his way of paying respects to the man, Rezso Kasztner, who saved him (and 1699 other Hungarian Jews) from mass destruction and certain death. In normal circumstances, acts like this would be considered heroic but Kasztner's story didn't quite have that ending in the newly independent Israel in 1950s. He was a Jew, who saved hundreds of other Jews, but was condemned by Jewish judges as a Nazi affiliator and finally was killed by the bullets of Jewish assassins.

Lately, his name seems to be somewhat cleared but why I found the book so well-written and touching is that it is a true story from the author directly to the reader. Books are something so much more personal than movies or TVs. What should I read next?

 Six million stories from the WWII will never be heard.
But here is one that survived.