DONAT, Alexander

Nationality: American (originally Polish; immigrated to the United States, 1946). Born: Michael Berg, Warsaw, 1905. Family: Married Lena; one son. Career: Journalist; worked for a tailor and a printer. Founder, Waldon Press, New York, 1949. Died: 1983.

Publications

Memoir

The Holocaust Kingdom: A Memoir. 1965.

Other

Jewish Resistence. 1964.

Neopalimaia kupina: Evreiskie siuzhety v russkoi poezii; antologiia. 1973.

Editor, The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary. 1979.

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Critical Study:

"Alexander Donat" by Myra Alperson, in Jewish Profiles: Great Jewish Personalities and Institutions of the Twentieth Century, edited by Murray Polner, 1991.

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Alexander Donat, the author of the memoir The Holocaust Kingdom (1965), was born Michael Berg in 1905 in Warsaw, where his father had lived since the turn of the century. In October 1944, when Berg was a prisoner in the concentration camp at Vaihingen, a transport was being prepared to leave. Berg exchanged his name with a certain Alexander Donat, so that he, Berg, could be placed on the transport. Soon after, the new Alexander Donat left Vaihingen with his new name, and the one who remained behind as Michael Berg was sent to Kochendorf, where the Nazis murdered him. Thus, the new Donat survived to remember the one who died bearing his original name.

By the time the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Berg had become an accomplished journalist living in Warsaw with his wife, Lena, and their two-year-old son. After the Germans took Warsaw in September 1939, however, he had to support his family by other means. When the occupying forces began hunting down journalists and other members of the intelligentsia, Berg fled the city. On January 2, 1940, he returned to Warsaw to be with his family. Once the ghetto was sealed, he attempted to obtain work with the Jewish Council, but to no avail. He eventually found a job in a tailor shop. After surviving the deportations of July-September 1942, Berg and his wife entrusted their son to a family of Polish Catholics, who managed to get the five-year-old child out of the ghetto in February 1943. The boy's parents remained in the ghetto and lived through the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the spring of 1943, only to be sent to Majdanek.

Once he was in Majdanek, Berg's skills as a printer saved his life, for in June he was transferred to a printing factory in Radom. In July 1944 the inmates of Majdanek were forced to march to Radom to escape the advancing Soviet army; in Radom, Berg joined them for their march to Lodz. Before they made it to Lodz, however, they were placed on a train destined for the camp at Vaihingen, where Berg became Donat. From Vaihingen, the new Donat went on to survive other camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau. His wife was also sent to Auschwitz and from there was transported to Oskar Schindler's factory in Czechoslovakia. Donat was liberated on April 29, 1945, by the Americans while being transported from Dachau to yet another camp.

When Donat and his wife were reunited with their son, Wlodek, shortly after the war, they discovered that the Catholic family had exercised a certain influence over the little boy. He told them that he wanted nothing to do with them because they were Jews who had killed his Lord Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, in April 1946 Donat, his wife, and their son immigrated to the United States, where he went into the printing business. His son, then called William, graduated from Colgate University and went on to have a family of his own. In addition to writing his memoir, Donat edited an important volume entitled The Death Camp Treblinka (1979). He died in 1983.

—David Patterson

See the essay on The Holocaust Kingdom.