Passport to Life

Small Press Bookwatch, Jan, 2005

Passport To Life

Emanuel Tanay, M.D.

Forensic Press

2977 Philadelphia Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48103

0976026317 $24.95

Passport To Life: Autobiographical Reflections on the Holocaust is the firsthand story of Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a successful forensic psychiatrist and a Jew who survived the depredations of Nazi genocide during World War II, when he was only a child. After the war, his experienced hatred and the threat of murder in his native Poland, but relative peace and asylum in Germany, and later moved to America. Sixty years later, his testimony is not only a narration of and reflection upon the genocidal atrocities he personally witnessed and experienced. It reveals the struggles of survivors to cling to life to be heroic and resourceful, in a situation where lack of power and arms among Jews in general meant that direct resistance against the Nazis would only guarantee personal extermination. Passport To Life is also an erudite and scholarly treatise on the nature of hatred, and the core human impulses that are all too easily channeled into sadistic and masochistic fervor ("you have to be carefully taught not to hate", the author warns), whether by organized religion, ideology, totalitarian government, or other sources. Passport To Life is particularly vital in that it deconstructs mythologies that have arisen about the Holocaust. For example, the author was personally present in Warsaw at the time the Uprising began, and warns against characterizing it as a true rebellion, since it claimed the lives of very few German soldiers and had zero military impact upon the course of the war. Rather, he characterizes it as a mass suicide of Jews who preferred to die from German guns rather than be sent to Treblinka. Since World War II there has been a tendency to overdramatize or exaggerate Christian rescues of Jewish people; Tanay respects the nobility of those who did so but also carefully delineates examples in which the truth is lost to the need to mythologize history and a few make good men into saints rather than confront the overall horror of what really happened. Tanay further dissects with clinical expertise the nature of hared itself, demonstrating that the most virulent hatreds are perpetrated against individuals or groups the hater knows nothing about, or believes fantasies about; hatred is not borne of logic or reason, and therefore rationality is no defense against it. Emphasizing the critical importance of broadcasting a counter-message to the many widespread propaganda of hate today, including but not limited to hatred against unbelievers spread within specific Islamic states, Passport To Life offers the key to understanding and hopefully preventing worse geneocidal deprevations in the future. Though it deals with complex psychological issues, Passport To Life is written in plain terms that invite no confusion regardless of the readers' level of familiarity with history or psychology. Passport To Life is far, far more than an autobiographical memoir. It is more than a record of Holocaust atrocities. It is quite literally the embodiment of its title, an indispensible contribution to Holocaust literature shelves and psychology shelves, and bears the absolute highest recommendation to school libraries, public libraries, Holocaust literature collections, scholars and lay readers alike. Do not pass up this book.