Book Review: The Watchmakers

 

The Watchmakers

A Powerful WW2 Story of Brotherhood, Survival, and Hope Amid the Holocaust

by Henry Lenga; Scott Lenga

Pub Date 28 Jun 2022 

 Kensington Books,  Citadel

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  History 

I am reviewing a copy of The Watchmakers through Kensington Books, Citadel and Netgalley:

Harry Lenga was born to a family of Chassidic Jews in Kozhnitz, Poland.   He and his two brothers were proud sons of watchmakers.  Mailekh and Moishe, studied their father’s trade at a young age. Upon the German invasion of Poland, when the Lenga family was upended, Harry and his brothers never anticipated that the tools acquired from their father would be the key to their survival.

Forced to live in the most devastating conditions imaginable, where death was always imminent, fixing watches for the Germans in the ghettos and brutal slave labor camps of occupied Poland and Austria bought their lives over and over again. From Wolanow and Starachowice to Auschwitz and Ebensee, Harry, Mailekh, and Moishe endured, bartered, worked, prayed, and lived to see liberation.

The Watchmakers is a compilation of a decades worth of interviews with Harry Lenga, conducted by his own son Scott and others, The Watchmakers is Harry’s heartening and unflinchingly honest first-person account of his childhood, the lessons learned from his own father, his harrowing tribulations, and his inspiring life before, during, and after the war. It is a singular and vital story, told from one generation to the next—and a profoundly moving tribute to brotherhood, fatherhood, family, and faith.

I give The Watchmakers five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!