Review of “Chance: Escape From the Holocaust” by Uri Shulevitz

This extraordinary memoir for readers in middle grade and up recounts events from the childhood of author and artist Uri Shulevitz, who survived the Holocaust with his father and mother. Documenting his Jewish family’s eight-year journey, he said in an interview about this book, “’It would be hard to invent this story,” says Shulevitz, who is now 85 and lives in New York City. ‘If I wrote this as fiction people would think it was too fantastic.’”

The story begins in Warsaw, Poland on September 1, 1939 when “Nazi planes burst into the Warsaw skies….” Uri was four years old. The bombings continued for days. Shulevitz writes:

“When the smoke settled . . . some people who a second ago had been standing on the breadline lay dead; others lay wounded. It all seemed unreal. Dazed, I watched, frozen in place. The distance between life and death had vanished. One second life, the next death.”

He observed that survival became a game of chance. Interestingly, even Uri’s name figured into the odds of whether his family lived or died. As a newborn, Uri stared at the flowers on their wallpaper all the time, so he was named after the biblical Uri, the first artist of the Bible. In 1940, after the family fled to Bialystok in the Soviet Union, Uri’s father tried to register them as Soviet citizens. The clerk refused, accusing his father of naming Uri after the “Zionist poet” Uri Zvi Greenberg, concluding they must also be “anti-Soviet reactionaries.” Not being able to get official papers changed the course of their lives, and ultimately and improbably contributed to their survival.

Sometimes Shulevitz reflects on the role chance played in his life as opposed to, as some claimed, divine intervention. He asks:

“Why would divine intervention have saved my parents’ lives when they were not religious? Why, then, did my devout grandfather die a miserable death at the hands of the Nazis, when he was a deeply religious man who observed every single commandment of his faith with love and devotion? Why was he not saved by divine intervention? I have no answers.”

This is the same question the famous Holocaust survivor, writer, and humanist Elie Wiesel grappled with, as well as many other survivors of the Holocaust. Shulevitz’s story is replete with events, however, in which it seemed to be only chance that stood between life and death. God was not in the picture. He could relate to the sentiment of the basic Soviet “theology” he absorbed: “Don’t waste your time asking God for beans; you’ll get nothing. Better ask the Soviets – they deliver.” When, after the war ended, Uri was near death in a hospital with diphtheria and scarlet fever, and the principal of his school said they had asked their rabbi in New York to pray for him, Uri writes:

“Dear reader, what saved my life? The prayers of the great rabbi of Brooklyn, or potato puree and a new wonder drug called penicillin? You decide.”

Throughout his childhood, Uri found ways to cope with experiences of intense and unrelenting hunger, combined with constant fear and antisemitic attacks. He wrote “days followed days when we had not a bite of food.” Many, many nights were spent sleeping in trains, sleeping outside, or not sleeping at all. At first, drawing became his primary means to distract himself. He would use a stick to draw in the dirt or burn a twig to use as charcoal. He made colors from flower petals or leaves. Later, when he had access to books, he found refuge in escapism through the adventures of heroes in literature. [After the war, he combined the two interests to make award-winning books.]

The conclusion of the war did not end their troubles, as other Jews in Europe found as well. The family tried to reestablish their lives in Poland, but many Poles had taken over residences and properties owned previously by Jews and they would not give them back. There were even murders of Jews who tried to return. In Kielce, Poland, for example, 42 Jews were killed in 1946 in a stunning episode of violence. Eventually Uri’s family tried living in Paris and then emigrated to Israel in 1949. In 1959, Uri moved to New York.

The book has many of Shulevitz’s illustrations, some saved from his childhood, but most created for this story. Perhaps a third of the book is in a graphic, comic-book style format. It is a saga readers will find hard to forget.

Rating: 5/5

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020